#when did unresolved feelings and self-worth issues make their way in there

[seelestia]

to those who asked for part 2 in gambler & knight: i'm working on it! but the ending won't be in that part – which is to say, that silly brainrot is becoming a series with more than just 2 parts. i've decided that penacony arc is too intricate to be condensed into one single part. i hope that's okay 🙏 so pls bear with me!

[pooks]

You know what would be really funny? If Ichiji and Sanji are bickering over something silly and Ichiji takes a step towards Sanji with his hands raised a bit and Sanji flinches So Hard that he falls down and curls up on himself to protect his hands. Even better if it's after WCI, all Sanji can see is the bright red hair and the hands that used to hurt him so much when they were younger, and suddenly he's a toddler again, and his big brother is trying to break him.

Ichiji sees the way Sanji reacts to him, and he just breaks down. He's a monster again, and then he's 8 and hurting his little brother again, punching him, dragging him, breaking his precious hands that were made to create.

Sanji's reaction to being in stressful situations is to either cook a weeks worth of food or, if it's worse, he just dissociates, almost catatonic, for a few hours or the whole day. The strawhats had never seen the second state, but it happens often after WCI. And they never know what triggers it

Ichiji just cries for a bit, and then his face does this thing where you can't see any emotions at all, and spends the next few days in the library, working like there's no tomorrow. That also happens a lot more after WCI

That would he funny

(I have an hc that the poison Sora took did two things: worsen the modifications in the other three, making them basically emotionless, and also made Sanji experience every emotions but times a 100 in intensity. Ichiji gets better, but not quite, more like Reiju, but he gets Really protective of Sanji when he realizes how much Sanji feels)

Ooof, straight into the angst, I see? Thank you for the ask and here's my take;

(CWs for past child abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation)

Sanji deals with this by stress-cooking & baking, it's his "happy place" so to say and it calms him down, allowing him to reflect on what just happened and think in a more rational way.

Ichiji doesn't have that luxury, he's mediocre at cooking/baking and he has servere self-worth issues. Post-WCI, he has unresolved suicidal ideation. Seeing his little brother react like that made him more convinced that he was a still irredeemable monster.

He locks himself in the library for days, he tries to use his writing as an outlet but it doesn't work out. Ichiji decides that he needs a physical outlet and he had vowed to never lay a finger on Sanji since they ran away from Germa first time. He gets the dangerous idea to take it out on the person he hates the most; himself. Once he gets that idea, it's stuck in his head.

Remember when Nami stabbed her arm when she was betrayed by Arlong in East Blue Saga? Ichiji is worse. Suddenly, he isn't at the Sunny anymore and he's back at Germa, strapped to a medical chair and is "experimented" on (read: tortured). Ichiji is back in his old mindset that he deserves the pain.

(This being post-WCI means that Ichiji's mental wellbeing is at its' lowest. And it got worse after seeing "Vinsmoke Ichiji" on his updated wanted poster.)

He eventually runs out of space on his arms (littered by fresh and half-healed scars). He leaves nothing on his hands because even in the depths of his self-harm breakdown, he can't bear to hurt his hands because of what Zeff taught him.

Running out of "self-harm space" means that Ichiji wakes up from his daze and realizes what he has done. He knows that he'll get an infection if leaves this untreated and sneaks into the infirmary. Well, he makes a lousy spy in this current state and Chopper freaks out when he sees what Ichiji has done to himself.

When asked what happened, Ichiji only responds "nothing happened". Chopper notices that Ichiji looks at himself and seems to be disgusted by himself and understands that Ichiji had a breakdown. He treats his open wounds properly and bandages them.

What happens then is that Chopper doesn't leave Ichiji unsupervised and ask the others to not let him out of their sight either. It's sorta an open secret amont the straw hats that Ichiji dehumanizes himself and believes everyone's better off without him.

Sanji eventually finds out what Ichiji did to himself and he wants to reach his older brother, but he doesn't know how to approach something like this. Out of options that won't make Ichiji probably worse or try to run away, Sanji decides to call Zeff on the den-den mushi.

They kinda bicker at each other for a long while until Sanji tells about WCI. He's shocked that Zeff already knew about Vinsmoke and what Judge did (since Ichiji told him many years ago and kept this away from Sanji). Zeff asks Sanji firmly to get Ichiji on the line, so they can talk.

Sanji doesn't know what Ichiji and Zeff talks about, but Ichiji cries a lot. He also catches on that Ichiji, even in his self-harm daze, never harmed his hands. It's very heartwarming that Ichiji took Zeff's lessons to heart.

Zeff acts like a mediator between them (read; tired dad who's sick of his stupid sons bickering). He also tells them to talk about their problems with grown men instead of acting like stupid brats. And the usual "don't make me go to the Grand Line to kick some sense in you!" and they know that he can, peg leg or not.

After the call ended, Sanji makes pan-fried seafood risotto (it's their comfort food). Ichiji tells Sanji that he wasn't going to hit him and he'd rather die than to do that again. Sanji quietly asks him if that was what he was trying to do.

Ichiji tells him the truth; he doesn't know why he did that to his arms, all he knew was that he was no longer on the Sunny (mentally) and finds the courage to tell what he endured for six months. What Judge did to him, as part of their "deal". It's a pretty heartwrenching discussion, both of them cries and hugs each other.

(At some point, Zoro walks in to get booze, sees them crying and hugging each other...and promptly walks out again. He felt this was something too personal for him to get involved with. Such an awkward marimo.)

For the next couple of days, Ichiji and Sanji are hardly far away from each other. Ichiji has moved his "writing session" to on deck, sitting by a small table with his typewriter (he uses a rock on his papers, to avoid them flying off to the seas). Sanji is doing laundry nearby and he likes the sound of Ichiji's clattering typewriter.

Also I like your headcanon, but also have my own; Ichiji always had emotions from the start, he was just manipulated and gaslighted that he didn't have any. In many ways, he was similiar to Reiju but add to the fact that he didn't know what emotions was and all he knew was that having emotions was strictly forbidden in Germa.

Also if you look closely in the flashbacks, Ichiji is somehow always standing next to Sanji (which breaks how they're supposed to be lined up in chronological order). Whenever they are lined up, sitting next to him in classroom, etc. And his eyebrows are the same as Reiju (and not like Njii or Yonji), but it isn't very noticable because of his hair covering one eye.

Anyways, thank you for the ask. :3

[wild-magic-oops]

Did god!Gale really forget about Tav/Durge until Withers's party? My headcanon about the topic:

I've got thoughts about god!Gale again and yes, he has changed since ascension in a predictably negative godly way, however the fact that he seemingly had forgotten about Tav/Durge doesn't exactly align with what else I see in the epilogue. And this is not me trying to make this ending better bc I like it btw. It just bothers me that things don't match and I like to headcanon about it, so kindly ignore if you don't agree.

1: Gale's reaction to breaking up with him/refusing ascension is quite telling about his feelings imo. He's visibly sad and disappointed about this outcome and still seems to genuinely love Tav/Durge. And his is not the kind of reaction you get from someone who just forgot their lover existed for months.

2: In his godhood path Gale combats his insecurities with ascension but predictably, that doesn't fix them. So he's still very much insecure about power and self-worth, particularly when others find him lacking. And now it hurts extra much because he sees himself as an improved version of what he was before. And when even that is not enough...

3: He still ascends Tav/Durge and personally, I don't buy that he does it just because he promised. I doubt making a new god is considered something to be done lightly. But moreover, being the god of ambition, making more competition for himself just bc of a promise mortal!Gale made is not productive and imo he realizes that very well. Perhaps he wants an ally, which is definitely more believable. But that still makes him forgetting all about Tav/Durge unlikely.

4: His excuse for not contacting Tav/Durge is that time works differently in Elysium and then not 2 minutes later he says that there are already shrines built for him and a big temple in the making. There's no way he didn't realize how much time has passed in the mortal realm.

Ofc you can argue that it was just a handy excuse and that he thinks a mortal is too stupid to see through it. And while he definitely has a bit of a condescending attitude going on now, it doesn't go that far imo. Personally I have another headcanon:

god!Gale postponed meeting Tav/Durge because he was afraid that he would still not be enough for them, especially after realizing he couldn't topple Mystra. That was certainly a bruise to the ego. So he stalled, built his reputation and power a bit, so when he finally meet his lover again, he would have actual things to brag about, and not just the ascension itself. A Tav/Durge who pushed Gale on his godhood path is one that had made Gale feel unworthy about his previous state (or rather - reinforced his feelings about it), so Gale has enough reasons/doubts to believe that maybe he still would not be enough in their eyes.

The thing about ambition is that nothing's ever enough, there always needs to be more more MORE MORE. And that combined with Gale's unresolved issues imo could explain why he didn't seek out Tav/Durge before Withers's invitation.

[scrappedtogether]

i heard velma & daphne series had velmaxfred and daphnexshaggy. what did you think of it? is it worth reading if your a fan of those pariings?

Hi Anon! Thank you for the ask and apologies for the wait. I ended up writing much more on this than I expected. 😅

In theory I think both Shaphne and Frelma work pretty well in the Daphne & Velma books. Spoilers below!!

Personally, I found the Shaphne relationship more compelling. Both Daphne and Shaggy come from a wealthier background. Daphne’s family is relatively new money while Shaggy’s is old. Shaggy’s family has a deep-rooted history with the town and most of their power is centralized there. Daphne’s family (at least her mother) doesn’t have the same connection to the land as the Rogers and yet their fame (again, mostly her mother’s) transcends the town. These create some nice parallels/contrast between their backgrounds.

Shaggy and Daphne both have a difficult relationship with one of their parents. Shaggy’s relationship with his mother is somewhat underexplored (there’s an argument to be made that the only reason he even has a mom is so they can have the classic teen-sleuth show cliche of someone’s parent being a police officer, allowing the characters access to police records, etc. it’s also possibly a reference to APN where Shaggy’s father was a police officer). His relationship with his dad, however, is rocky. Although Book 3 shows that Samuel Rogers has some affection for his son, Book 2 has Shaggy absolutely petrified of him. Daphne has a very tumultuous relationship with her mother, who she’s been estranged from since her parents’ divorce.

Both Daphne and Shaggy have a lot of self-image issues stemming from their relationships with their families. Daphne has a lot of unresolved anger from when her parents separated and Shaggy feels tainted by his family’s blood. Both Shaggy and Daphne feel they’re destined to hurt the people they love. Shaggy spends a lot of his energy in the series trying to make up for his family’s wrongdoings and Daphne spends a lot of it trying to atone to the people she hurt after her parents separation. It gives them a unique connection and understanding of one another.

They’ve also have sort of a push-pull thing going where Daphne is very reluctant to get close to anyone due to her abandonment issues and Shaggy has a hard time letting people in because of his self-loathing. They have trust issues and yet both find that they’re some of the few people the other can trust. There’s even a particularly cute scene in (I think) Book 3 where Daphne reflects that although she has a hard time putting faith in people, one of the foundations of her worldview is that Shaggy would never lie to her.

Frelma works with the two of them being more oppositional. Velma has spent a lot of her recent life feeling invisible (in part due to her parents’ troubles but also because of her lack of friends/popularity). There’s a part of her that enjoys it, because of the security it gives her, while another part of her craves recognition. Fred, on the other hand, craves the spotlight. He loves being the center of attention. One of the cute details about Fred (tho tbh it’s one of the only details abt Fred) is he’s constantly pulling stunts for attention. Throughout the books, he’s usually referenced in the background doing handstands or cartwheels.

It’s sort of implied that this juxtaposition between them drives their mutual interest in each other. Fred doesn’t really understand Velma’s comfort with remaining in the shadows while Velma can’t fully comprehend Fred’s interest in being center-stage.

In a lot of ways, Frelma feels like the more conventional story being told. This is probably just because Fred unfortunately has way, Way less time for development than Shaggy. We never really learn anything substantial about him (besides that he’s attractive, athletic, has a great smile, is fashionable, his hair is blonde and perfectly coifed, has a pool, dresses well, and did I mention he was good-looking?). Because of this, a lot of Velma’s attraction to him seems driven by how good it makes her feel to be noticed by him (handsome, pretty, popular Fred who could have any girl he wanted). As for why Fred is attracted to Velma? It’s honestly very unclear. Again, part of it you could assume is just that he’s interested in how different she is than him but we never get much elaboration. If Fred was a meaner character, you could honestly assume he likes her just because she’s not falling over him like a lot of the other girls, that Fred enjoys the fact he has to *work* for her attention. But that honestly feels a little mean-spirited and I doubt it was the author’s intention.

Frelma more than Shaphne could have benefitted from some tightening up/editing of their relationship. Honestly, it bothers me that Fred first seems attracted to Velma when she takes off her glasses. It’s not just because this is overplayed (in both versions of the live action and others) but because I’m not exactly sure what the intent was there? Velma’s mentioned by Daphne to be very pretty (while actually she says hot, well ACTUALLY she says “stealth hot” which is an interesting term) but it’s unclear if the dance at the party where Fred first noticed Velma w/o her glasses is the first time he finds her pretty or if there’s more to the story.

This sounds crazy but I was actually waiting for all of Book 3 for Frelma to have a scene where Fred confesses that he’s *always* liked Velma or that he’s had a crush on her since they were kids. In this series, the Gang are all mentioned to have been friends when they were ten before a falling out caused them to part ways. I kept expecting some mention of this to be made by Fred as far as his feelings for Velma went but oh well. I think it also might have added a cool contrast to Shaphne with Frelma being the classic “loved you since childhood but I’ve only just now had a chance to tell you” and Shaphne being the “I’ve never seen you in this light before but I think I love you.”

Probably the biggest flaw of the series for me is the lack of acknowledgment about the history that the Gang shares. I find it super cute and compelling and just a great writing choice on the part of the author to have established this rapport between the characters.

It’s a really clever and fun way of being able to have the Gang all be strangers to each other (effectively) at the start of Book 1 and yet come together very quickly as though they’d never been strangers at all (once they’d reestablished those childhood bonds). But the Books don’t??? Do that.

I understand and respect and LOVE that the main focus of the book series is the relationship between Daphne and Velma. It’s very sweet and well-written and far and away the best part of the series. They have such natural chemistry and affection for each other. It’s perfect.

I only wish it could have been extended more to the rest of the Gang. Like I said, the book series establishes earlier on that Daphne & Velma were best friends growing up and there was one summer where they spent pretty much every day with their two other friends, Fred and Shaggy (and Scooby!) and even formed Mystery Inc., spending the whole summer solving mysteries with each other. Very cute.

Only, Daphne and Velma don’t seem to consider Fred and Shaggy childhood friends, like, at all. There’s several moments in the first book where Velma & Daphne reflect that Shaggy feels like a stranger to them, that they don’t know anything about him and never really have, and Fred never seems to benefit in terms of the progression of his relationship with either Daphne (who he almost never speaks to) or Velma from their shared history. And it’s like, I get it, they were friends when they were kids. Obviously, that doesn’t mean you know them super well as teenagers.

But it’s just a missed opportunity, I think, to not have them be able to benefit from that “sandbox love” like Velma and Daphne do. Daphne and Velma also haven’t spoken to each other since they were ten and yet after five years, they’re able to come back together like no time has passed at all. It’s very endearing and sweet. And while I understand that D&V were said to be the besties of the group while F&S were the tag-alongs, it’s unfortunate they never got to use that history as an excuse for them to “click” in the same way.

Velma and Daphne say in one chapter that they don’t know Shaggy at all but in later chapters they’ll reflect that they had sleepovers with him all the time and still remember his house like the back of their hand. It creates a hollow space in the narrative that I think would have been very satisfying to see be filled, if the Gang could have all ended up as friends in the end, built off of a childhood love and history with one another.

And Daphne and Velma are very close, can almost read each other minds and know each other’s hearts, and it’s a running theme in the books that they can’t trust anyone but each other. I get that and I can roll with it. I just wish there wasn’t so much disconnect between the Gang because of it.

Shaggy & Velma & Daphne & Fred & Scooby we’re all close once but the narrative never really uses this to do anything interesting with the characters (besides V&D) other than giving them a backstory I really love and enjoy.

I think the history could have been easily propped up to bolster Frelma and Shaphne in an interesting way it just never got there.

And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cute moments between them (Daph makes Shaggy laugh when he’s upset in the bg of one scene, she holds his hand when he’s upset, they hug, and she blushes seeing him at the beach, Velma and Fred have some cute banter, he tucks the hair behind her ear a few times). It just might have been cute to see a few moments sprinkled in to remind you that these characters have known each other a lot longer than we’ve known them and they have an entire history we haven’t been given access to.

Maybe part of me is so disappointed just because, again, I think the author did such a phenomenal job with the V&D relationship and weaving in their childhood that I would have completely adored seeing how she could have done something similar with the rest of the Gang.

It also might have been interesting to see Fred & Shaggy interact a bit more. There’s a REALLY good scene in Book 3 where Fred is in danger and the Gang’s not sure if he’s alive where they demonstrate so much distress and horror. I just would have really loved to see more moments like that or some smaller moments between them. Fred & Daphne don’t interact much which is interesting just because they run in the same circles so they seem to have less estrangement between them, yet they never really talk to each other. You don’t get much insight into Fred from Daphne’s POV, nor does she really reflect on their relationship at all. There’s quite a few moments (esp in Book 3) where Velma sort of observes how Shaggy & her have this special connection because they’re both on the outskirts of the social circle (Velma through exile and Shaggy through self-imposed exile). It would have been cool to see some sort of parallel with this for F&D where they also could have experienced a special connection because of their shared social standing.

It’s odd too because Daphne is able to remark pretty confidently on the fact that Fred is interested in Velma (tho later she mentions how he cycles through girls because he’s always going after whoever briefly catches his interest) which seems to imply she knows him but it’s never explored. Daphne and Fred also don’t have history between them even though Fred has been said to date around and Daphne is in with the in-crowd. It seems like she’d have more insight into him than Velma does but he remains somewhat of a mystery.

Shaphne also ends up in sort of an odd place in Book 3. There’s a subplot I didn’t particularly enjoy in Book 2 where Daphne becomes very interested in a college-age intern, Ram (mind you she’s fifteen in the book), and talks about how she’s finally ready to let someone in and break down her walls. Long story short, Ram ends up breaking her trust which hurts Daphne.

While I didn’t love the Ram plot line, I did think it was a very solid jumping off point for Shaphne to begin in earnest. When Daphne starts thinking romantically about Shaggy, she always distracts herself with thoughts of Ram, though she’s interested in Ram she can’t help but reach for Shaggy and think about him even when she means to be thinking about Ram. I thought the Ram plot line would conclude with Daphne recognizing her interest in Ram had been driven largely by her interest in Shaggy. She tries to start a relationship with some random guy but can’t because someone else is always occupying her thoughts. She tries to let someone in but gets her trust broken. Maybe the right person for her is someone she trusted all along. I think there’s even an argument to be made that her feelings for Ram are somewhat of a cover. She pushes herself into liking this conventionally handsome, stalwart, uncomplicated guy to distract herself from the feelings she’s beginning to have for Shaggy, a person that she really cares about. Daphne has abandonment issues and it’s clear she’s afraid to consider starting anything real with anyone she actually cares about because she’s afraid of losing them/of them leaving her (once they see the “real” her/the monstrous side of herself she hates).

BUT, these all become sort of moot in the end. Ram returns in Book 3 full-force (seriously, don’t like him, get him outta here) begging for Daphne’s forgiveness, continuing to flirt with her, until at the end of the book Daphne forgives him. It does end with Daphne commenting that Ram’s charms no longer work on her (choosing instead to keep Shaggy’s secret instead of telling him) and her final thoughts being that she do “pretty much anything” to protect Shaggy. I’d call it a win, though I do wish Ram got shot down a bit more brutally (sorry to anyone who likes him, I’m just not into it at all) and Daphne was a bit more assured in the flavor of her feelings about Shaggy (romantic). It also would have been cool for Shaggy to get a few more scenes where he seemed interested in Daphne. Tbh, he’s just a ball of stress in Book 3 so I don’t blame him, but it could have been cool. I was Really, Honestly expecting Daphne’s revelation/confirmation of her explicit romantic feelings about Shaggy to be the scene where he gets upset and Daphne remarks something along the lines of how she’s never seen this side of Shaggy before but she’s drawn to it. That would have been a good place, I think, to pin it shut, but the author had their reasons for leaving up to a bit of interpretation which is fine.

ALTHOUGH, while on the subject of Shaggy’s feelings for Daphne, I do think they could have used his complicated relationship with Marcy to expand on it. He clearly had something with Marcy and it was interesting to note how both Shaggy & Daphne were drawn together because of a mutual love for her but it doesn’t get too much attention outside of Book 1. Also pretty bitter Shaggy never got to give Daphne a forehead kiss like he did with Marcy smh.

This isn’t to say that Shaggy’s feelings for Daphne are never implied because I definitely think the vibes are there (laughing together, touching each other). Shaggy is pretty much powerless to say no to her and the scene where it’s reflected that Shaggy would do anything to protect Velma and Daphne (when he has the knife to his throat in Book 2) is cute parallel to Daphne’s final thoughts on Shaggy, tho his protectiveness extended to Velma as well so it’s not a one to one.

Overall, super enjoyed Frelma and Shaphne. All the Gang was written to be very kind, caring individuals. Shaggy, Daphne, and Velma had a lot of complexity (sorry Fred but I love you bby) and I think any shakeout of relationships between the core four would have worked well. They were all just sweet and the heart of the Gang’s dynamic was definitely there.

In another timeline, this would be a Vaphne book with Fraggy coding but alas.

TL:DR: Yes!

TL;DR Yes! If you really like Frelma and/or Shaphne, (or Vaphne!!!) give it a try!

Sorry for the extremely lengthy answer. If you read this far, I hope it helped and interested you at least a little. Thank you again for the ask! Ask box is always open. 👋

[confessionsofabitteroldwoman]

I should have told you what needed to be done in a house we both lived in.

You expected everything to be sorted when you weren't there to help, got mad that it was the state it was, and then left me to finish it all off. Left me on my hands and knees as I did the job you said you would do. I spent my day off waiting for someone on your behalf, then spent hours trying to get to and from the letting agents to return the damn keys.

You were mad I was mad that you were three hours late. There's always an excuse for you, a reason why this and why that, how dare I be mad.

You tell me we treated our friend horribly and implied I was doing the same. You said you felt awkward around me on my birthday celebrations because I wasn't talking to you much, the day where I am surrounded by other people I don't get to see as often as you.

You know I hate confrontation and you throw that to my face, tell me I'm not allowed space to think because you want to tackle the problem then and there.

You keep telling me that you might come across mean but it's only because you care. You tell me how I should be acting if this friendship mattered to me. You say "Surely nothing that's been said or done merits destroying a 10 year friendship right?"

But you tell me that you think I only included you in something because I lived with you and couldn't hide it from you.

You bring someone else in into the discussion even though they live a million miles away for what?

You tell me we're supposed to communicate once again, tell me we're supposed to fight for each other but I feel like I've just been in a boxing fight with you and you're telling me that it's all okay so long as we talk about why we're hurting, because this is what friends do when they care.

I go through over and over again, over and over and over. And I want it to stop.

I want you to stop, stop telling me what good friends should do, stop telling me how I should process my feelings. Stop telling me I need to communicate when all I feel from your communication is the responsibility of whether this friendship continues. That if it falters and dies it's because of me, that you were just communicating and I shut off.

You tell me to communicate and yet you sit and talk about me with another friend, a friend I have weekly dinners with. A friend who clearly has some unresolved issues with me, and you two were able to make amends for what you did to her and now you have a common enemy. But I still sit in her house, and hers mine, talking about life and houses and the future, and I can't look at her properly anymore. Like at any point that bomb will explode and I won't know what to do.

You tell me to communicate but she clearly has unresolved issues she never once tried to communicate to me.

And when this friendship dies, I'm the bad guy. Because I didn't do enough, I didn't communicate enough, I was mean and horrible, probably self-centred and self-serving.

What merits destroying a 10 year friendship? Perhaps it's someone constantly telling you nothing is worth losing a 10 year friendship as she drills the 101 ways you could have been a better friend.

[patrickxpearson]

Closed to: @alecwinthrop

Location: Beach It was charity. What other reason did Patrick need to attend an auction and find himself ‘buying’ some quality time with a staff member - when all of them were available to him with a mere call? It was for charity – something that Patrick hoped to make him feel better about himself when deep down he was feeling… not so great. Being away from Alexander thorn his insides apart, a constant feeling of longing keeping him company ever since that argument at the King’s house. He didn’t like sleeping alone. He missed Alex spooning him from behind and waking up to his smile every morning – but while he was not as well educated as Alex, Thomas or even Steven Blackwell, Patrick had eyes. He wasn’t stupid. There were unresolved issues between Alex and Steven and while a part of him felt bad for putting a pause on what he had with the King so that he had the chance to figure out what was going on with his ex-fiancee… another part of him was already preparing for the worst. What chances did he stand against a man that Alex was going to get married in the past? Their actual relationship was still fresh… there was no way he could compete against memories of years together. But as long as Alex would be happy… He would also be happy?

Patrick sighed as he stepped onto the beach as the sun began to set on the horizon. It was still warm but not as hot as it had been hours prior and to him, what better time of day to meet the staff he had won at the auction? He had met Alec before and he was happy that he managed to buy the time with someone he was already familiar with rather than a complete stranger. He had texted Alec earlier for the other man to meet him at the beach during sunset – and all he needed to do now was wait… while praying that the ice creams he had bought for them wouldn’t melt before Alec arrived. Honestly… all he wanted was to give Alec his ice cream and thank him for being such a good sport, kiss him on the cheek and send him home. Not only was Patrick aware of how it felt sometimes for a staff to be forced to be with someone they didn’t want to be with but he also wasn’t feeling his usually happy, go-lucky self. If anything… he was feeling his rage and aggression bubbling on the inside. Angry at himself, at Alex, at Steven… at the whole fucking world. Sure, he lied and cheated on people for information but he had never actually hurt anyone. His morals weren’t exactly noble or worth following but not everything about that world was fair. So why was life being such a bitch? He had finally found someone he loved and it was now being taken away from him. How was that fair? Should he be more like the Blackwell and the King’s? Ruthless? Unforgiving? Care about nothing but himself? If that was the answer… what other choice did he have?

[furiousgoldfish]

Was I neglected as a child? Checklist

Bold if you experienced it, italicize if you're not sure. If you read a line and it rings true for you, but you think 'that's my fault because I never said anything', bold that line! This is about your experience, not blame assignment. (tw for painful content ahead)

Physical neglect

I couldn't count on having clean and decent appropriate clothing every day.

I couldn't count on having decent meals every day

It was my responsibility to make food/assure there's clothing even at a very young age, or there would be none

I couldn't count on being taken to a doctor when I needed it

I was not receiving proper vaccinations/medications as a child

I was not taken care of for my injuries, flu's, fevers, or health issues

I was left alone and ignored when sick

I felt guilty, ashamed and/or scared when sick

Nobody noticed if I was injured, sick, or scared of something that was happening to my body

It was safer for me to keep my sickness/injuries/medical fears to myself

I felt it would bother everyone, or make everyone mad with me if I admitted to being sick, hurt, or scared about my well being

I had to take care of other kids as a child, so my physical well being felt like an afterthought, it was something I was supposed to take care of myself

If I was taken care of physically, it was used as a blackmail later, I would be required to allow myself to be controlled as a return 'favour'

My medical issues were neglected to the point where they turned into long-term issues later

Emotional neglect

I haven't felt it was safe or welcome to open up to my parents or caretakers as a child

I was not encouraged or supported in expressing my emotions or experiences

I was not encouraged to speak about my passions, desires, or what I wanted from life

I was repeatedly attacked, shamed, ridiculed or manipulated with any private information I would share, forcing me to learn to hide

I was not welcome to speak unless I was somehow entertaining or giving out vital info

It was communicated to me in subtle or direct ways that it doesn't matter what I want or need, and that nobody cares

I was shamed and accused for wanting/needing attention

I was not receiving supportive or warm physical attention as a child (encouraging pats at the shoulder, affectionate hugs, being stroked in approving/affectionate way)

I felt uncomfortable receiving physical attention from my parents as a child because it communicated ownership and non-consensual enforcement, rather than approval and pride

I felt completely alone in any hardship and pain as a child, and knew nobody would stand by my side

I didn't feel safe asking for help, explanations, reassurance, comfort, physical attention or to be listened to

I felt like a burden if I wanted for someone to hug me and tell me it's all going to be okay

I was never comforted or reassured after crying or having a breakdown

I would get ignored, laughed at, humiliated or punished for crying, breaking down, or exploding in rage

I was taught that what I feel is irrelevant, and I would do better to stop expressing it

I was taught that expressing any painful emotion would get me nowhere, and it was better/safer to hide it

I spend hours crying or breaking down in pain/terror/stress/anxiety/catastrophizing alone with no comfort and nobody who cared or wanted to hear what I was going thru

I was to take the role of comforting and emotionally caretaking for my parents, or other children

Psychological neglect

My parents didn't notice I was depressed/anxious/psychologically unwell

My parents failed to provide me with a diagnosis for adhd, autism, or similar struggle, and I had to live and deal with it all on my own

My parents failed to believe me I was mentally ill or struggling with any kind of disability or trauma, leaving me to endure it all on my own

My fears about my value, or my future, were only intensified by my parents behaviour; I never felt reassured and secure in my current living conditions, and even less my future ones

My parents failed to acknowledge my sexuality, gender, world view, and pretended it wasn't there

My parents failed to notice I was self-harming

My parents failed to notice I was engaging in other self-destructive activities that could have, or did, cause long term damage to my life

My parents failed to notice or do anything about changes in my behaviour that signalled trauma (becoming aggressive, clingy, dissociated, numb, closed up, bed-wetting, nightmares)

My parents failed to notice I was missing school

My parents failed to notice I was failling into addictions

My parents failed to notice I was suicidal

My parents failed to notice my suicide attempts

Lack of protection

I was unsupervised for long periods of time as a small child

I was exposed to physical danger as a child without my parents noticing or reacting to it

I was exposed to physical danger and physical violence, by my parents

I was exposed to pedophiles and child predators as a child and was never warned, protected or removed from their influence

I was introduced to pedophiles and child predators by my family members

I was never given protection from bullies, or any unfair treatment during my education

I was never given support or comfort after being hurt by a stranger or a peer

I was bullied/abused/sexually assaulted by another child, and nobody noticed

I was bullied/abused/sexually assaulted by a sibling/neighbour/relative/teacher/peer, and nobody noticed/nobody stood by my side or tried to protect me

I was groomed by a predator (who could even be a family member) and nobody protected me or stopped it from happening

I was exposed to and groomed by a cult, and nobody seemed to notice, care, or help me get out of it

I was not given the knowledge to recognize a sexual assault on me, or grooming or any other predatory behaviour from strangers or other adults

I never felt protected from any outside danger, or felt like I was worth protecting; instead I was taught to feel guilty and ashamed for getting hurt at all

If you have bolded more than 4 of these, you have experienced neglect, and you were forced to struggle alone thru experiences that you were not meant to handle or survive on your own. Neglect is the type of abuse that will have the most disastrous consequences on your trust in people, your relationships, self worth, feeling of community, and will ensure that everything you were put thru is unexpressed, unresolved, and weighing down on your life. You did not deserve to be neglected like this, and none of the above is the result of your behaviour. You were not supposed to be put thru any of this alone, much less as a child.

[pomegranates-and-blood]

In loving me, in loving you

My Masterlist

Pairing: Modern!AU Ivar/Reader, (background Floki/Helga, Björn/Snæfrid, Ubbe/Torvi, Sigurd/Blaeja & past Ubbe/Hvitserk/Margrethe, Ivar/Margrethe)

Summary: Ivar returns to Kattegat with you for the first time in a long time, resulting in a lot of unresolved issues haunting him. 

Word Count: 11.3k

Warnings: 18+. Modern!AU. Fluff. AAAngst. Smuttish stuff (kind of dubcon for a bit there). Ivar’s issues (as for specifics? Take your pick, we’ve got body issues, abandonment issues, sexual intimacy issues, I can go on. But I’m serious, they are there, plus quite a bit of ableism, and a lot of Ivar’s issues with his self worth and his self perception. Also a tiny dive into Ivar’s sense of self when it comes to other people, how he ‘is always acting’ because he is always watched/under scrutiny). Mentions of surgeries, broken bones, and hospitals (nothing graphic except a bit on the broken bone part). This might be OOC, idk. And, lastly, my writing (I’m rusty af, I’m trying but idk)

A/N: This is my entry for @maggiescarborough​‘s 400 Followers Celebration, with the prompt, “Making breakfast together.”

I am so late to this, I’ve been really slow with writing lately (for the past six months lmao). You have already reached another milestone and here I am with an entry for the previous milestone’s celebration, I’m so sorry. You deserve all of us and more ❤️

Title is from the quote: “I am afraid of you. In loving me, you hold a knife to my throat. In loving you, I tell you exactly where to cut. We are two against the world, yet I still do not trust your hand in mine. This is new, and I am terrified.” (a.j.) Which, y’know, fitting.

Btw, setting: modern, Ivar is around 23-ish and the others are aged accordingly to that, Reader is non-Danish but spent a few summers in Kattegat (that’s all the specification on her), ‘canon’-ish compliant, Aslaug and Ragnar are dead but the brothers are on good terms or as good as it can get with this wild pack of morons, Björn is getting married for like the third time. That’s all that’s important.

As an insider tip of sorts: permanence and happiness are interchangeable for this idiot, even if he doesn’t realize it 😉

Ivar catches sight of your leg bouncing up and down on the seat by his side, and before he thinks twice about it, he puts a hand on your thigh to stop you.

Your gaze leaves the window to drop to his hand on your leg, and delicately, with a gentleness that still catches him off guard sometimes, you trace the tips of your fingers over the back of his hand, following invisible lines.

After a deep breath, voice low, you murmur, “It is always a little nerve-wracking when your boyfriend first brings you home, you know.”

He scoffs, “Kattegat isn’t home.”

Ivar finds that saying that out loud serves as a reminder for himself as well.

You lift your gaze to him, and offer a small shrug.

“It’s still the place you grew up in,” He envies you for that easy nostalgia you can feel towards the town, and the way you speak of it as if it were something perfect and something you miss makes anger boil under his skin. He rolls his eyes at your words, earning a pinch on the back of his hand to make him meet your eyes again. You tilt your head to the side and offer, “Have you ever thought about how, if my family had continued to vacation there, you and I would have met a lot sooner?

He has. Meeting you when you did is one of the things he is most grateful to the Gods for though.

At his silence you turn back to look out the window, intertwining your fingers with his.

“Aren’t you at least curious to see what has changed? Six years is a long time.”

“Nothing changes in Kattegat.”

Permanence isn’t something Ivar is used to, something he has let himself get used to. For everything that has made his life what it is, there is no permanence, for any of it. Not in people, not in stability, not in anything.

Except this damn city. This city has always been here, and it will always be here, and nothing here changes, it seems. Unnaturally, strikingly permanent, that is Kattegat to him.

Coming back to it is unsettling him more than he likes to admit, and he knows you are aware of that. He hates that, he hates the fact that you know, the fact that you understand.

The world is changing, and we must change with it, Ragnar told him once. He isn’t sure if it was Ragnar that told him that, if he’s honest. Maybe it was Björn, or Ubbe, with one of their neat little tricks of opening their mouths and letting their father speak through them like some twisted version of a marionette.

Ivar understands what he meant by that. Maybe more about the world changing than about how he has to change with it, but he understands.

Everything changes, and people come and go. They have ever since he has memory, from his father to his mother and everyone in between, and so Ivar has gotten used to not counting on people staying around for long.

But even as people come and go, even as everything changes, Kattegat doesn’t. He feels that in the stale air, in the ground under his feet that -impossibly, he knows- makes walking harder.

There are people approaching the car even before it has fully stopped, and Ivar gathers he must have been glaring when you squeeze his hand and tease,

“Just one week, baby. Think you can hold off on killing Sigurd for that long?”

He only offers a grunt of, “No promises.”

He rationally should have no reason to worry, right? You have met everyone here before, and especially since you and Ivar moved in together over a year ago, you are close to Ubbe and Hvitserk -much to Ivar’s dismay-; there’s no crazy shit his family can pull that you haven’t lived the condensed version of with him and his two brothers.

Still, coming here fills Ivar’s stomach with a strange sort of dread, makes him feel like the other shoe is about to drop but the bastard is making sure to torture him before finally hitting the ground.

“Oh, you must come to the house,” Helga is telling you before you are through with your greetings, grasping your hand in both of hers with a bright smile. “The crane Floki built for me made painting the Iceland landscape I showed you much easier.”

Your eyes are wide when you ask, “You finished it already?”

Floki giggles, a proud smile that makes the lines around his eyes deeper when he looks at his wife.

“She did. Her best so far.”

“Where?”

Floki seems unbothered by Helga’s hands reaching into the pockets of his jacket searching for the car keys, instead offering you a gesture of his head to the car and his wife who is already on the way to it.

“You’ll see.”

You leave Ivar behind with a rushed kiss, almost skipping your way to where Helga awaits in the car.

���A crane?” Hvitserk asks as they watch you two leave, and Floki shrugs.

“She’s running out of parts of the house to paint on,” He explains. “I caught her too many times stealing ladders from my workshop to make platforms, figured I’d make her something more permanent.”

“You built a crane inside your house.” Ubbe states, to which Floki only offers a quiet giggle with a familiar glint in his eye.

“Just the living room.”

He spends the rest of the day catching up with his uncle, and they all figure by the time the sun starts to set and you and Helga haven’t returned that you two got caught up doing something.

A bubble of anxiety starts in Ivar’s chest at the thought of that, of what you might be doing with Helga. Maybe you are walking around Kattegat, meeting old friends of hers and Floki, seeing all the things that might have changed since you last visited, finally seeing all the things that haven’t changed and that would never change.

He now sits in the living room with his brothers, half-listening to a story Floki is telling them about his and Helga’s latest trip to Iceland, absently turning his crutch around over and over, making it twirl on the hardwood floor. Ivar cannot help but think of all the things you might learn -about his family, about him- while he isn’t there to prevent it, to fight against it, and finds that the restlessness inside him quickly and certainly builds into irritation, anger.

But the fears are unfounded, he realizes as the front door opens, as he watches you return with a jar of sourdough and a skip in your step.

“Ivar, look what Helga made for me!”

“We’re not keeping another one of those.” He grumbles, but you ignore him and continue talking towards the kitchen to store it until you leave.

“What’s so bad about that?” Blaeja questions quietly, a small frown between her brows.

“She treats it like a…a pet.”

“We need to remember to feed it, but this time it will grow, trust me.” You’re telling him as you walk back into the living room, sitting by his side and resting your head on his shoulder.

Ivar offers a shrug of his free shoulder to Blaeja, who only smiles.

Lowering his head to speak to you, he insists, “Just call it refreshing, love.”

You look up at him, leaning to press a few kisses towards the corner of his mouth, smugly pleased that by the time you reach his lips he cannot keep the foolish smile that curves at them.

Stubborn and purposefully infuriating, you only say, “It needs feeding, Ivar.”

____

He will admit he has missed having Helga and Floki so close, he will admit he grew used to their presence when he was a child and he could never quite outgrow that foolish feeling of safety he has around the two of them. No matter how many times they visit in Copenhagen or meet with him and his brothers for a short vacation near Vestfold, there is a strange nostalgia, even if bittersweet, to being here with them.

And not just them. He realizes as people start to leave, as Björn and Snæfrid retire for bed and Sigurd and Blaeja follow soon after, as Torvi’s kids fall asleep and she whispers her goodnights before Ubbe helps her carry them upstairs; that he lets go of a tension he hadn’t realized he held, a tension he isn’t sure if he ought to blame on the travelling or on this town.

But here, now, he doesn’t have to think about how he sits and how he moves his legs to settle in his seat, and when he stands he doesn’t have to try and make his gait more regular even past the strain it puts on his body. He can forget, around them, around you.

For better or worse, in this small group of people -Floki, Helga, Ubbe, Hvitserk, and you- he has found the few people crazy or stubborn enough to actually stay long enough to make him almost believe in something close to permanence.

But it is stupid, it is hopeless, to get used to this. Any of it.

People don’t stay, people aren’t permanent. Even if they want to be, even if he wants them to be, he knows that.

You jump in your place excitedly, drawing Ivar’s attention to whatever it is you are talking about with Helga.

“Yes, ‘Serk has told me about them!” You say, eyes bright, “I don’t remember much, we only spent a couple of summers here. I’ve been dying to go, to be honest.”

“I can take you,” Helga offers, leaning forward, elbows resting on her knees, and smile wide and sweet. “I can show you where I buy the pigments for my paints.”

“Go where?” Ivar interrupts, something in his chest tightening at the bright smile that curves at your lips when you turn to look at him. “Where…where is she taking you?”

“The street markets, near the pier.”

“No,” He blurts before he can think twice about it. He feels eyes on him, and he hates it. Still, he keeps his gaze on you, and tries amending, “I can…I can take you instead.”

It still sounds harsher than he intended, but he doesn’t care.

He cannot have you go there, mingle amongst the people -and he knows you will, because the all-too-bright smile and the stubborn kindness make people flock around you, too closely for his liking most of the time; and if you go with Helga it will only be worse- and…and get closer to Kattegat, have a closer look at it and all the things that remain the same in this damn town. He can’t let that happen.

They will remind you how you are dating the crippled son of the man that gave them glory and ruin, they will whisper about how he became talk of the town when he tried sleeping with his brothers’ fuckbuddy and failed miserably, they will tell you about all the things they know about him and all the things they see in him.

Ivar cannot have you see him like they do. He cannot let you go to them without him there to make sure you can look at him and see the man he has become -a man that has somehow convinced you to stay with him for over three years now- instead of whoever they will try to make you see him as.

He sees it in the faintest of furrows between your brows, that you want to argue, that you want to ask questions, that he isn’t fooling anyone. Still, Ivar holds your gaze, and with barely a narrowing of your eyes, you shrug and accept.

“We’ll go in the morning, yeah?” You tell him, the intonation of a question in your tone but you don’t wait for an answer before you turn to Helga again, “We can meet for lunch, go to the fields by Scar Mountain? I’ll finally take you up on that painting lessons offer.”

Ivar isn’t sure if he should appreciate or be wary of the way you seem to easily diffuse the strange atmosphere that had taken over the room at his refusal to let you go to the markets without him. But, as Helga starts telling you of the vineyard at the back of the estate that you could go to instead, and whatever story Hvitserk was telling Floki with broad gestures resumes, he gathers he can ignore that for the time being.

What he can’t ignore, however, is the way Ubbe looks at him now. He knows that look, because that is how he would look at Ivar when he was younger –your eyes are very blue today, Ivar, maybe you should stay inside-, that is how he would look at Ivar when Sigurd made a show of making sure everyone knew he couldn’t even sleep with a woman -Ivar, do not listen to him, what they think doesn’t matter-, that is how he would look at Ivar when he returned from that fucking trip where Ragnar decided to leave him in some old Christian’s hands only to find his mother dead -it was sudden, Ivar, there was nothing anyone could have done-. He hates that look.

Ivar grits his teeth, and looks away, feeling his expression twitch in an anger he cannot -and doesn’t want to- hide.

The night goes on as expected, and the group of people remaining becomes smaller and smaller as catching up doesn’t seem that much of a priority over sleep anymore.

With the complaint that the car ride here on top of the plane ride was too much for one woman to handle, you stretch your arms over your head. Even though he is almost certain you didn’t mean to, you succeed in drawing Ivar’s gaze to the small expanse of skin that is revealed when you lift your arms, and the pang of something the simple sight sends through him makes him feel as if it were the beginning, and he were once again craving every centimeter of skin, of you, that he can be granted, feeling as if every part of you was something strangely unattainable even when within reach.

With the request that he doesn’t leave you waiting too long that you whisper against his lips before kissing him goodnight, you go off to bed. Ivar watches you go, ignoring Floki’s eyes watching him.

Now it has been hours since you have gone off to bed, but he can’t join you yet. Ivar would blame his inability to sleep on the stress travelling put on his body, but he knows if he starts lying to himself he is in deep shit.

Returning to Kattegat has fucked with his head, he knows that, and he’s about completely sure you know that too.

And now this town takes from him his sleep, even after all it has taken. Ivar forces the part of his mind that whispers his sleep is not the last thing Kattegat will take from him to quieten, and walks out to join his brother on the small porch overlooking the back of their family’s estate. They are the last two awake it seems.

“Couldn’t sleep, eh?” Hvitserk asks, leaning one shoulder against a pillar.

“The Gods surely blessed you with Sight, haven’t they?” Ivar retorts, deadpan.

“Right when they blessed you with a great personality.”

“And why are you awake, hm?”

His brother shrugs, “You are all coupled-up over there, I want to avoid getting scarred for life by hearing any of you go at it.”

“Nothing you haven’t heard before; you and Ubbe used to fuck the same woman.”

“Not at the same time,” His brother retorts, but Ivar makes a face at the obvious lie. Before he can start arguing, Hvitserk concedes, “Not soberly at the same time.”

“That’s more like it.”

“So, who do you think will be next?” Hvitserk asks, leaning against the pillar again and looking out at the vineyard with distant eyes.

“Next?”

“It will look bad on all of us if the next wedding is another one of Björn’s,” His brother explains, drawing a chuckle from Ivar. Still, he acquiesces with a movement of his head, because he does have a point. “And Ubbe won’t marry his brother’s ex yet. So, Sigurd or you?”

He snorts a short laughter, maybe a tad cruel, “Blaeja isn’t marrying Sigurd, she isn’t that stupid.”

Casually, his brother insists, “So you, then?”

Hvitserk is many things, but subtle isn’t one of them. Ivar is almost glad this stupid dance is over and his brother is asking what he had been meaning to since the start of this conversation.

“I know you like to believe you are smarter than me, brother, but we both know you aren’t,” Ivar bites out, gritting his teeth at the way Hvitserk doesn’t fall for the taunt, instead only looking at him expectantly, eyebrows raised. “Floki told you, hm?”

“No, Floki told Helga, a-…”

Ivar sighs, “Of course he did.”

“And she told me,” Hvitserk puffs out his chest, “I’m still her favorite.”

He has to resist the urge to roll his eyes at his brother’s boastful claim, and instead taunts,

“At this rate, I think Y/N is her favorite,” His brother scoffs at his words, but doesn’t deny it. After a few beats of silence, Ivar takes a breath and presses, “So everyone knows?”

“No, just Floki, Helga,” Hvitserk lists off, head titled to the side, “And your dear brother, whom you didn’t bother telling you were planning on getting hitched.

All the answer he offers is a grunt, and he doesn’t bother elaborating on that, turning his attention back ahead.

“Does Y/N know?” Hvitserk teases, but there’s something else there, in his tone. It sounds a lot like Ubbe’s voice. “Because, even I’d say that’s something y-…”

“Of course she does, we’ve talked about-…she knows,” He interrupts, frowning, running his thumb back and forth over a ridge on the handle of his crutch. “You think I’m going in blindly to ask her to marry me? I’m a cripple, not an idiot.”

A few beats of silence, and then,

“Why haven’t you, then?”

“That is none of your business.”

“I’m asking anyways,” Ivar rolls his eyes, adjusting his grip on the crutch and walking back inside. Hvitserk chuckles, “You’re leaving it at that?”

“You continue to amaze me with your deduction skills, my brother.”

____

Happiness doesn’t leave a scar, you told him once, and he still remembers how his eyes were drawn to the curve of your smile that day as much as they are today, it is not so easy to remember it, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

He remembers grumbling something asking when you had achieved such wisdom, in a wry tone that made you narrow your eyes but still smile at him. But the words stuck with him, infuriatingly so.

Because now, taking a moment to let his eyes trail over your features relaxed in sleep, taking a moment to take in the image of you in his space, soft, loving, trusting; the image that has been so consistent and so craved it has almost become a necessity to him at this point -and needing something sometimes makes people believe it is permanent, that it will stay only because they will it to, and he fears letting himself believe that this, you, is something he can keep-; Ivar feels his chest grow tight at the thought that this will not leave a mark.

The way your voice curls around the short sound of his name in the morning doesn’t leave a mark, even if it never fails to make shiver run down his spine. The shine in your eyes when you offer a crooked smile and quick-wit to his teasing doesn’t leave a mark, no matter how the stuttered beats of his heart because of that damn smile try proving otherwise.

Late conversations, your voice low and almost a whisper as you tell him you love him, your eyes shining with adoration he sometimes still believes to be a lie, the trembling hope that if anything else this might stay that fills him as he dares speak of a future; none of that has left a mark, none of that will. When he loses this -because everything changes, nothing is permanent, he knows that- what will be left for him to remember any of it by? How will he look back at this and still believe it anything other than a hopeless and quickly-lost dream if there is no mark to speak of, nothing permanent that dream leaves behind?

He gathers a ring on your finger would somehow make things more permanent. It is certainly a better option than the slightly-less-centered version of himself he was a few months into the relationship offered, which was to somehow convince you to tattoo yourself for him.

But every time he thinks about asking you, every time he thinks about finally putting that ring on your finger…Ivar is haunted with questions of what will be of him when -if?- it all eventually ends.

Tonight, he settles for the pleased little sound you let out when he settles in bed with you, and he tells himself there’s little promises of permanence to be found in the way you sleepily turn to snuggle against him. In the quiet murmur of his name you offer as a greeting as Ivar gathers you in his arms, he tells himself he has to accept there will be no scar to show for times like these, times with you.

Once, he could have been content, he could have left the worries of having no scar as proof of this happiness behind. But ever since returning to Kattegat, happiness doesn’t leave a scar sounds too alike happiness is nothing.

____

Growing up as the son of the Ragnar Lothbrok, more specifically as the crippled son of the Ragnar Lothbrok, left Ivar very aware of people’s eyes on him.

His brothers would argue that he feels eyes on him when there are none, but he knows better. They are always watching, either with that disgusting pity in their eyes at the poor cripple, or with that startled fascination at the crazy son of the legend, but they are always watching. Even when they are ignoring that he is there, they are watching in a way.

Returning to this town feels like returning to all those eyes on him, to all these people that know who he is, what things were like before.

Returning here feels like he is once again who he was before he even left, like all these years didn’t matter, like all he has done doesn’t matter.

And it doesn’t, really, does it?

These people won’t care what he does, what he achieves; he will always be the same to these people. Nothing changes about Kattegat, not even who he is.

Here he will always be Ivar, who his own father wanted to give away when he was born. Ivar, who was always in such danger of breaking his bones. Ivar, who tried and failed miserably at sleeping with a woman. Ivar, who would never be equal to his brothers, who would never live up to his legend of a father.

He looks at you now, your eyes sparkling as the lights and sounds of the street market reach you, your smile bright and unbearably soft, and he wonders how long it will be until all you see of him is what they see.

How long until there’s pity in your gaze when you look at him? Poor Ivar and his legs, his pain.

Or how long until there’s fear? Unpredictable, crazy Ivar, with his temper, with his anger.

How long until you don’t look at him with that softness he once resented anymore, with that adoration he sometimes loses himself in? How long until you realize you can’t love him?

Because you can’t. Love him, that is.

No one can, no one has. Not here, not like this.

Not that he would ever tell you -it is somehow more pitiful to him than having had to tell you he had never been with a woman before you-, but Ivar hasn’t really known what it is like to love, or be loved. Not by anyone that chooses to, that isn’t his family.

Trusting someone to love him, to actually accept his love for them is not something that is…easy, for him. He is not in control if he is letting someone see him for who he is with only the hope that they will love him anyways, he is not in control if he is offering away his heart with no safeguards that the person holding it is there to stay; and if he is not in control, he has nothing.

And yet that is exactly what he has stumbled into with you. In more than one way -but sadly the more fun ways are not the most important ones- he has given up control.

To Ivar it feels like dangling over a cliff, and having let go of the rope he was desperately grasping at even as it chaffed and burned away at his skin, in exchange for the hold of your hand, hoping you wouldn’t let him fall. You haven’t, yet.

With you he has had no choice but to let you know him, has had no choice but to grit his teeth through each time words tumbled from his lips like you had somehow put him under a spell, has had no choice but to accept your softness and your warmth without calling it pity, has had no choice but to have you see everything that makes him Ivar ­-the Ivar you met in Copenhagen, the Ivar the people of Kattegat will always see, and whatever is in between-  and hope you will want him anyways.

But he knows when it is someone’s hand he holds and hopes to keep him over the edge, he is surrendering too much to trust, to love. Eventually, you will let go, and no matter how much he tries holding on, you will slip through his fingers. Eventually, you will grow tired of holding on, you will realize what you are holding on to, and you will let him fall. No amount of trust you can make him put in you or love you can promise him will make Ivar believe that losing you is anything other than inevitable.

Now you both are passing by familiar streets, and he feels eyes lingering on the two of you, on your fingers intertwined with his, on your easy smile contrasting against his grave features, on the delicate and bubbly steps you take even past his uneven and slower gait. He knows they do, he feels their eyes on him, and he, as always, finds himself wanting to stand taller, to make it so that they can’t ignore him, so that they can’t overlook him, meet their eyes and force them to see him and accept that someone like you is someone he can call his own.

The soft touch of your free hand on the inside of his arm startles him into focusing only on you.

“Is Sigurd allergic to anything?” You ask, offering a small shrug at the question you can see written in his face. “Figured I’d cook something tonight. I know ‘Serk can’t eat anything with onions, but I don’t know about Sigurd.”

He has yet to tell you Hvitserk is not allergic to onion at all, just hates them vehemently because Ubbe and Floki once made some caramel-covered onions and had six-year-old Hvitserk bite into it. His brother still gags at the memory, and when you held your phone to your ear about to order them takeout on a night so many months ago Ivar cannot remember much about it, and asked if there was anything they couldn’t eat, Hvitserk didn’t hesitate to yell onions. And it stuck, and for over three years of dating Ivar you have believed his brother is allergic to onions, somehow.

Ivar leans closer, eyebrows raised and chest growing warm when your eyes fall to his mouth, having seemingly distracted you with the teasing curve of his lips.

“What’s the fun in telling you, hm?”

Whatever you open your mouth to say is stopped by a laugh somewhere at your backs. And Ivar knows, he knows, that it has nothing to do with him, nothing to do with you, but it still feels like it.

He remembers coming into some bar so many years ago, looking for Ubbe in between grunts that they move the fuck out of his way so he can roll his wheelchair in between the sea of people, he remembers the laugh, mocking and obnoxious and just loud enough so he would hear it.

He remembers, he remembers the tone in Ubbe’s friend’s voice as he taunted, who’s the cripple?

He remembers that idiot and all the others, he remembers all the stares and the mockery and the disgust. Kattegat doesn’t change, Kattegat would never let him forget.

And you say something, probably an answer to his taunt with a smile on your lips that anywhere but here he wouldn’t hesitate to lean down and taste against his own; but he cannot hear anything past the rush of blood in his ears.

Turning around quickly unbalances him, and Ivar stumbles back before he can catch himself, catching his foot on the sidewalk and falling against a bench.

He feels the bone break before the pain can reach him, that pressure building and snapping is familiar to him by now. And in that small window of time, in that unending little moment, he bitterly thinks that if he weren’t Ivar, Ivar the crippled son of Ragnar, Ivar that they must pity or ignore, Ivar; all that little stumble would have been would be a fall and nothing more.

The pain reaches him, blinding pain that feels like molten steel poured on him, travelling with the speed and ruthlessness of lightning up his leg.

Yet all he can think about when the scream of pain makes its way past his lips no matter how much he tries gritting his teeth past it, is how now they will see, now their attention will be on him. Not on him, on who they see when they look at him: Ivar, poor fucking Ivar.

He grasps at the arm you offer before he even realizes it is there, and trying to blink past the blinding pain, Ivar grunts as he moves to stand up again.

“Wh-What are you doing?” You ask, but still you grip tightly at his forearm, offering him balance. “Shouldn’t we ca-…”

“No,” Ivar bites out, breathing past the pain. He feels nauseous, but he refuses to embarrass himself further and just puke his guts out in the sideway, so he makes himself breathe past that too. Maybe breathing past so many things is the reason why his breaths are so fast, why no air is really entering his lungs. “We drove here, we can drive back.”

____

His damn leg is put on a cast and he’s sent home with words of numbness should be expected since there’s a damaged fibular nerve, and keep an eye out for any pressure building around the ankle, and the usual pitying look and the pat on the shoulder before the take care of yourself.

On the drive back you are quiet, and Ivar hates it. You’re never quiet, and he almost wants to demand you say something, anything, even if it is what you are really thinking and it is a confirmation of what he’s already sure of: you’re having second thoughts.

He was stupid to think this was somehow going to work out in his favor. That this was going to last. People don’t stay, good things don’t last, they aren’t permanent.

Nothing is permanent. The stretches when his legs are stronger, or his pain is lessened, are always going to end, he has been used to that ever since he was a child. That means the bad stretches don’t last either, yes, but they always return, because the good is never permanent.

He told Ragnar once -the last time he saw him alive- that he wished he wasn’t so angry all the time; because for as long as he has had memory Ivar has been so fucking angry. At Fate for being such for him, at his father for his absence and for everything else, at his mother for her special attention, at Ubbe for his pity and at Sigurd for his jealousy, at himself for his weakness, at everyone, at everything.

For as long as he can remember he has been angry, because for as long as he can remember there has been nothing he can count on being permanent, being…safe. Not even his body lets him have that, that certainty that even in the midst of chaos there’s something he can hold on to.

Because one fucking stumble and how he’s broken his fucking leg and you aren’t fucking talking to him.

Ragnar told him he would have been nothing without his anger, and even after all this time -even after that dismissal from his father to what his answer was that still stings- Ivar still holds on to that lost cause that only makes more anger grow in him, because…he could have been happy.

Leaning his head back on the headrest of the car seat, driven mad further and further by your fucking silence, Ivar hears his father’s words and thinks bitterly how the old man was always right.

Happiness is nothing.

You didn’t know what you were agreeing to when you so easily talked about a future with him, he sees that now. Coming here, especially now, will make you realize what it entails to live with him, will make you understand -like he does- that good things don’t last and his damn legs make sure no one forgets that.

And once you realize that, you will be gone before he can even start to fight against it.

And while a part of him is filled with anger, anger that feels vicious and all-encompassing and blinding, because how dare you, how dare you play with him, how dare you turn your back to him; what is there to do?

What is there he can do or say to prove to you a life with him is worth having?

If he had never brought you here, if he had never come back here to this fucking town, then maybe he could have; because maybe he could have made sure you see of him what he has become and not what he was.

But he never could stop being him, could he? He could never stop being the boy he once was -it’s mental to think as himself six or so years ago as someone entirely apart from who he is now, Ivar is aware of that, but…thinking about it that way helps, he can’t explain why, but it does- and the longer he spends in this fucking town the more he realizes that.

Still, he tries, he tries reminding you -reminding everyone, even himself- that he made something out of himself past who he was here, that he is more than the poor cripple they insist on seeing.

And the days pass and he feels more and more on edge because of that need to remind all of you of it, he feels like he’s driving himself mad, he feels like he’s somehow confirming that nothing changes in Kattegat.

He snaps at the slightest of Sigurd’s taunts, he dismisses Ubbe’s pitying attempts to help him with biting words, he throws cruel accusations Hvitserk’s way; and he knows he’s going about this whole thing the wrong way, he does, and he knows that there’s even less of a difference between who he was then and who he is now if all he does is lash out, but at least this is something he can control.

They would never understand, none of them, not his brothers, not you, not anyone. He’d rather be hated, he’d rather be considered crazy, irate, anything; above being ignored, above being considered some poor cripple they ought to pity.

As long as Ivar gets to be the one to decide what they see, how they feel; he doesn’t care if what they see is a monster, if what they feel is hatred, or fear.

As long as he is the one that decides what or who he is, nothing else matters.

Ubbe approaches him one morning and offers him a pair of keys, slapping them against his chest with a frustrated grunt.

“You are going crazy in here, and are driving all of us crazy too,” His brother tells him, pulling his hand back, and as Ivar catches the keys, Ubbe puts a hand on his shoulder. The look he levels him with is stern, fatherly in the way Ivar hates. “Stay the rest of the week there with your girl. Return for the ceremony with less of…all of this.”

____

You let go of that infuriating quietness the further away from the estate you get, leaving Ivar to wonder if you hate it as much as he does, and, if you do, leaving him to wonder why.

Still, sharing this little cabin with you, sharing space with you like this, it makes him all the more aware of your silences. It feels strange, all of this, it feels…foreign.

Like living on borrowed time.

Now Ivar sits on the bed, already having showered and taken the meds, including the new ones, on the first night you spend alone in this cabin, unable to stave off the feeling that he must do something, unable to shake off this restlessness that whispers of powerlessness.

When you step out of the shower, the towel the only thing hiding you from him, Ivar calls your name, extending a hand towards you.

With a smile halfway between teasing and loving, you step closer, tilting your head to the side.

“Something you want?”

If you want him to say it, that’s fine by him.

“You.” Ivar replies without hesitation, smiling darkly as you walk closer to him.

He’s grown used to this intimacy with you, has grown to crave it. It is as easy as breathing, even if breathing is exactly what becomes difficult, to move with you on this.

But somehow this time feels different, somehow there’s an edge of anxiety, of something else, lurking on the corners of his mind, looming over him.

Still, Ivar keeps his eyes on you as you walk closer, trying to dispel away any thoughts of times other than this as he lays almost naked on the bed, waiting for you to walk to him and bare yourself for him.

You do, a small smile on your lips as you let the towel drop at your feet.

He admires her naked body in the low light, but a part of his mind, a part of his mind that becomes louder and louder with each passing second, lingers on the robotic way she took her clothes off.

Instead of letting his thoughts chase themselves in circles, bringing up useless memories, he reaches for you hand grasping at the back of your thigh before slowly trailing upwards, grabbing more tightly at the curve of your ass.

You chuckle quietly, roughly, hoarsely, and move even closer.

You pull the sheets covering his legs back, not hesitating for a moment, not faltering at the sight, and for some reason that is what makes Ivar feel the most on edge.

Her expression carefully blank, Margrethe grabs onto the edge of the sheets and pulls them back quickly, as if she wants to get this over with. The expression remains blank, and Ivar has never felt more humiliated, more rejected, by an unexpressive -resigned, disgusted, uncaring?- face before.

Your hands on either side of his face, bringing his lips to yours distract him for long enough, but he feels as if he is trying to move underwater, as if he is trying to return the kiss but he can’t quite make himself move as he wants to.

He is suddenly once again inexperienced, scared, unprepared, unwilling, and…and he can’t do this.

Pushing you away but refusing to get far away enough by grasping at the sides of your hips, maybe a tad desperately, Ivar tries catching his breath.

What if he fails? What if he…can’t? What if he can’t and you take her place in his memories? What if he goes back there, what if this proves he never…what if this proves nothing ever changed?

You take your hands off him -he knows why you do that, he knows because there was a time when you knew by the cadence of his breathing when he couldn’t take any more of your touch, and he hates that you think the same applies now, because it doesn’t, because things changed-, but Ivar shakes his head at the lack of you.

“No, no. T-Touch me, I don’t…I don’t want you to stop.”

He doesn’t want you to pull away, that is true, but there’s a borderline-painful edge to the way feeling your touch on him is overwhelming him that he doesn’t know how to put into words.

“Ivar, y-…”

He interrupts you with a hand on the back of your neck, bringing your lips to his almost forcefully, almost desperately.

“I want you,” He tells you against your lips, opening his eyes to search yours. “Do you want me?”

“Of course. I always want you, always will.” You promise quietly, fervently.

He nods at your words, trying his best to keep them resonating in his head, and moves you both so that he is laying on top of you, holding himself up on his elbow for one moment -one moment, to take in the sight before him, to make sure there’s no disgust, no fear, no resignation that he was too blind to see before- before he buries his face in the curve of your neck, trailing kisses and bites wherever he can as your hands roam over his back.

He wants you to want him. He wants to know you need him as much as he needs you, he…he needs to know you crave the feel of his skin against yours as much as he does, he needs to know you get as drunk off him as he gets off you.

He needs you to want him, he needs you to accept him, deficient body and horrible temper and all. The realization dawns on him like a weight dropped on his chest.

With the uncanny ability you have to sense his discomfort -he has no doubt it was a skill you mastered in those first months of the relationship, where every time you got close enough he felt like he would unravel at the seams, and not in a good way-, you pull back from the kiss, your hand on his shoulder to keep him away.

“Baby…” You start, but he shakes his head at whatever it is you are to say.

Claiming your lips again, Ivar doesn’t hesitate to slip his tongue into your mouth, chasing after the taste of you, chasing after the muffled little moan you let out against his lips, chasing after the way your hold on him tightens as if you cannot have him close enough.

It hasn’t happened in a long time but it happens now, that when he settles above you, pressing against you between your parted legs, when you lift your leg to trap one of his, he feels as if his body suddenly grows cold. The urge to push you away, to make you stop touching…touching them, to do something so that you do not feel them, to do something so that you can forget; fills him and makes his heart double its pace in his chest.

He's being stupid, he knows he is. It’s you, it’s…it’s different.

So he gives himself no time to think, he continues the trail of his mouth down your body, catching your nipple between his teeth and working it just enough to make you shiver and press against him.

He wants to prove to you that it’s different. That he is different. He has to.

Ivar loses himself in this, in you, for long enough that he can actually start to relax and think that he did the right thing, that he was right, that he can prove now that it is all different, that he is.

But your hand reaches to palm him over the cloth of his boxers, and running through his veins there’s nothing but fear.

He forces himself to still under your touch, even if he has to grit his teeth to keep himself from telling you to stop; and his hands clench into fists at his sides, no longer able to hold on to you in exchange for holding on to whatever control he has left.

He feels like flinching away from the touch, even if it is the same touch he has found himself desperate for many times, even if it is you and he trusts you and things changed.

But they haven’t, not here. Nothing changes in Kattegat.

For all the turmoil something as simple as your touch caused in him, for all the fear and helplessness it made him feel; it doesn’t compare at all to the way you pull away makes Ivar feel.

“I can’t…I can’t do this.” You murmur, not able to hold his gaze. As you sit up on the bed, moving away from him.

No, no, no. This can’t be what you see of me. I’m different, I’m more. I can prove that, I have to, just let me.

He feels like throwing up, that is all he can think about. He feels bile churning at his stomach, because you…you can’t…

“Are you disgusted because you have to touch the cripple, is that it?” He blurts out before he can stop himself. Your eyes widen with affront, but at least you are looking at him again. Decided to make you say what you’re really thinking, even if he has to make you hate him to get you to admit it, to get you to drop the ruse, Ivar presses, “Are you ashamed that you’ve fucked me before, now that…now that we’re here, hm? Answer me!”

A scowl marring your features, you bite back, voice raised as well, “Are you hearing yourself right now!?”

“Why don’t you tell me the truth, hm? Admit it, you’ve seen what it is like, what I-I’m like and y-…”

“Ivar, slow down. Breathe.” You instruct, suddenly alert. But he notices the way you reach up to touch him and stop, and why are you stopping when everything is normal, when everything is different than it used to be?

“No,” He argues mechanically. He thinks he shakes his head, or maybe that’s just his heartbeat rushing in his ears. “Tell me the truth.”

“You know the truth, Ivar,” You reassure him again. “But I’ll tell you, if you just…just breathe for me.”

Anger boils away at his blood, making him feel restless, powerless, caged.

And suddenly your softness isn’t love anymore, suddenly the adoration that used to shine in your eyes is nothing but a lie, a lie that he has told himself or you have told him. It is pity, it is disgust, it is a twisted kind of cruelty.

The words leave his lips like a curse, “I don’t need your pity.”

“Are you going to talk to me or your own thoughts?” You ask instead, a helpless little chuckle falling from your lips, “There’s no answer I can give you until you listen to me, baby.”

“I’m listening.” He insists, but he knows his heart is still thrashing wildly in his chest, he knows he is still breathing unevenly.

“Love, we’ve spent the…the last three years together. The best years of my life, mind you. I love you, so much,” You explain slowly, and when you finally reach with your hand and don’t stop yourself, you cup the side of his face, thumb tracing under his eye. Ivar grits his teeth to keep himself from leaning into the touch. You offer a small smile, “You think a broken bone can change that?”

He breathes in slowly, tries making it steady, and argues, “It isn’t…it isn’t just that.”

“I know,” You tell him without a breath of hesitation, “But nothing changes the fact that you are…you are remarkable. You are so damn smart, and so determined I’m tempted to call you stubborn,” You offer a smile and he grows warm at the sight of it, offering a small smile of his own, even if he feels as fragile as spun glass right now and that small gesture might as well be the crack in the glass needed for it all to fall to pieces. “You are strong, and resilient, and…and a nightmare to deal with sometimes, but I love you, yeah? I love you because of who you are, and you are the man I love, the man I’m proud of, whether we are home or here or anywhere else.”

“Don’t lie to me.” He says. He meant it to sound like an order, but whatever strength he wanted to put behind his words is gone, and it sounds like a plea more than anything.

You lean close, pressing your brow against his, “Never.”

He feels exhausted for some reason, and there’s this dull pain in the center of his chest that hasn’t left yet; but more than anything Ivar feels the burning weight of shame upon him. He feels as if he somehow failed, he feels pathetic.

Those feelings seem to only heighten when you get out of bed, the cold seeping into his bones in your short absence.

He settles on his side, but refuses to close his eyes because he is somehow sure the flashes of images -memories- will come back when he does.

At some point you return to bed, and he feels the material of the long-sleeved shirt you choose to wear when it grazes over his skin as you mold your small body behind his, your arm thrown over his torso and resting near his heart.

Your breaths trailing over his upper back are a rhythm he can find himself getting used to, a calming pattern that lures him into relaxing into the soft mattress.

Still, because there’s a part of him demanding he hold on to you, Ivar lifts a hand towards yours. For some reason touching your skin seems strangely overwhelming, and instead he grabs on to the sleeve of the shirt right over your wrist.

He closes his eyes, and counts your breaths until he falls into a dreamless sleep.

____

The next morning he finds you on the small porch of the cabin, an empty cup of coffee on the table by the side of your chair, and your gaze on the landscape ahead.

Swallowing past the apprehension that seems to take over him, the insistent feeling of having ruined something, Ivar moves his chair until he is sitting right beside you.

Biting his tongue even though more than anything he hates your silence, he waits for you to speak.

“I think you know already, but…you are different here, Ivar.”

“Different.” He repeats, a question even if he doesn’t voice it as one. He keeps his gaze ahead, but when you reach to hold his hand, he doesn’t stop himself from lifting your hand to his lips, pressing a kiss over your fingers.

“Since we got to Kattegat, you seem…on edge. I don’t know, I just know I hate it. You aren’t as different in this place, with me, but…” Your words end with a sigh, and he turns to look at you. You tilt your head to the side, a quirk on the corner of your mouth as you clarify, “Before you argue, I am not saying I change you.”

He bites back irritation, closes his eyes for a moment against the strengthening of the headache that hasn’t left him since he woke up, and presses, “What are you saying then?”

The words are quiet, strangely solemn, and the curve of your smile turns a little sad when you look at him, “This town does. Has.”

Without another word, without awaiting an answer, you stand up and walk back inside.

He reluctantly admits -to himself, he is not letting you know that you are right anytime soon- that he does feel the change in the couple of days he can spend holed up here pretending the world outside of this cabin is anything but Kattegat.

And before long you are able to fall into a routine of your own, not unlike the routine of your vacations to Vestfold together, or of your daily lives together in your apartment. The pain gets manageable pretty early on, and he is used to living life with a broken bone or a splinted leg; and though that means the has to use his chair more than the crutch, he accepts it for the time being.

“I never got to ask you,” You start on the last night you will spend here alone, since tomorrow you are moving back to spend the last night before the ceremony in the estate with the others. You are walking to bed dressed in one of his warmer shirts, and Ivar prompts you with a quiet hum, but he is more focused on the expanse of your bare legs that on whatever you want to ask him, if he’s honest. Throwing your legs over his lap, careful not to jostle his left leg too much, you press close, one of your hands -as always- finding a way up his shoulders to play with his hair, and continue, “How will Björn get married?”

Not bothering in keeping himself from feeling your soft skin, he trails his hand up and down your thigh, venturing under the hem of the shirt and squeezing lightly on the curve of your ass before moving back down your leg.

“He usually manages by convincing some poor woman he can make a good husband. My guess is with a lot of sex,” He retorts, knowing he is smiling like an idiot at the way you roll your eyes, chest growing warm when you breathe a short laugh. Still, you tug lightly at his hair in reprimand, and after leaning down to press a kiss under your eye, Ivar amends, “I don’t know what you mean, baby.”

“Like…what will the wedding look like? What do your people…do?”

“At weddings? Get married, usually.”

Frustrated, you press your lips together, before slowly breathing out. Ivar finds your anger equally adorable and hilarious, and cannot keep the mocking smile from his lips.

“Will you insist on getting on my nerves or are you answering anytime soon?”

“Are you giving me a choice? Because I-…”

“Ivar!”

He tries placating the anger with another kiss, this time closer to the corner of your mouth, before he explains as best as he can what a ceremony would look like.

As he tells you about the handfasting and the colors and symbols the bride would most likely wear, he cannot help but imagine what it would be like, to see you dressed in red, little accents of gold, a small crown of flowers braided into your hair.

Ivar licks his lips, finds himself a little lost in your gaze, finds his heart doing a stupid flip in his chest when he notices the entranced expression you wear as you listen to him. Maybe you want this too, as much as he does.

You have talked about this, of course you have, late conversations about what a life together would be like, and quiet confessions that you see yourself marrying him one day. But this, talking about it like this, with you looking at him like you want him, like you love him; somehow feels different, feels more…permanent.

You keep asking questions, and he keeps answering. He could never give the fervent and in-depth explanation Floki could to any of your questions about the Gods and the Old Ways, but he tells you about the wedding traditions as best as he can.

Your eyes have fallen closed a while ago, around the time you asked why there was a Mjolnir embroidered on Snæfrid’s wedding dress, and Ivar’s are as well, though he remembers his did around the time he started to explain bride running.

And, now laying on your sides on the bed, he lets himself doze off in that quiet that follows the last of his answers, keeping himself just awake enough by continuing the movement of his hand, trailing up and down your back.

Before he can convince himself that he should shut his mouth, before he can remind himself that he is just chasing after crumbs of a promise of permanence that he shouldn’t be trusting anyways, Ivar mumbles your name, opening his eyes to find you already looking at him.

“What would your wedding be like?” He asks you, searching your gaze as if he can somehow find the answer to the question he isn’t asking written there. “What…what do you imagine when you think of that?”

Your smile is a little tremulous, and he finds his heart trembling alongside that faint curve of your lips.

“I have to admit, a wedding dress of all red does sound appealing,” Your words make the breath catch in Ivar’s throat, but before he can say anything you lift your hand -your left hand, he isn’t so sure why he’s so aware of that- and trace his face with the tips of your fingers. “As long as I’m marrying you, I don’t care about the rest.”

He searches your gaze, half-convinced he heard something wrong, half-convinced still that it is impossible somehow. You offer only a small shrug of your shoulder, and a smile he feels his chest pull tight at how much he craves to feel pressed against his own lips.

But he has to ask, he has to make sure, “Wh-What are you saying?”

“I’m not giving you an answer; you haven’t asked any questions.” You retort with raised eyebrows, but there’s a warmth in the smile that breaks past that façade that lets Ivar breathe freely for what feels like the first time.

With a chuckle that sounds trembling to his own ears, Ivar closes the distance between you, kissing you, eager for the taste of you and for devouring the faint moan you muffle against his lips.

He kisses you slowly, deeply, knowing he would kiss every inch of you if you didn’t insist on keeping his mouth trapped -willingly, he would willingly be trapped by you always- against yours, your hands as certain as his, as demanding as his, as they pull him towards you, refusing to let any space come between you.

Ivar reaches between your legs, moving your panties aside and almost groaning against your skin when he feels how wet you are already.

You arch into his touch, filling Ivar’s veins with that electrifying, addicting warmth; making his heart thrash in his chest with that restlessness and that tranquility; making his throat tighten with that certainty of being wanted. Your hips raise to grind against him through both your clothes, and he gasps at the contact, breath ghosting over your neck, making you shiver and pull him closer, impossibly closer.

Your hand somehow finds itself on his hair, and you tug with enough force to make him hiss as a shiver runs down his spine at the sharp sting of pain lingering on pleasure. Obeying and lifting his head to you, Ivar meets your gaze.

Your own eyes dark, you pull him against you, kissing him with the same passion as always, with the same gentleness intertwined with hunger as always. Pulling away with the faintest of bites over his lower lip, you trace a maddening little trail of kisses from his mouth to the line of his jaw, until your mouth is right by his ear.

His eyes flutter closed at the breath you linger on before speaking, making everything heighten in anticipation.

Voice hoarse, you confess, “I want you, Ivar.”

He doesn’t need to hear anything more than that, though he does anyways, drawing moans and whimpers and breathless calls of his name for as long as you let him, forgetting himself and the world around him in the silk of your skin, in the spell of your kiss.

____

When Ivar wakes up you aren’t there, but he is almost certain what woke him up was the sound of your voice somewhere in the house, so he puts on a pair of sweatpants and moves himself onto his chair to go looking for you.

He finds you sitting on a counter on the kitchen, a small pile of dirty dishes at your back and a lot of flour scattered about the kitchen, your gaze engrossed on your phone.

“What are you doing?” Ivar asks, left thumb going back and forth over the edge of the push ring of his chair.

You lift your gaze, offer a smile that is purposely bright.

“Making the best breakfast of your life.” You boast, an adorable jut of your chin upwards as you smile proudly.

His eyes narrow, “Why?”

“You’ve had a shitty week,” You shrug, “I know from experience good breakfast helps with that.”

Your words, the memory they invoke maybe, do manage to make a small smile pull at Ivar’s lips, even if it is flickering and doesn’t last much.

He was a good three weeks into knowing you, already way too far into you, and you had gone radio-silent for five days until Ivar found an excuse to confront you and make sure you weren’t ghosting him. Looking back at it he knows he could have done something less abrasive, but here he is now so maybe it wasn’t that bad of an idea.

His grand idea was simple, really. He went to a restaurant you had taken him to on one of your first dates, that specialized in local food from your country; and bought -a probably absurd amount of- food, then going to your place and offering to cheer you up with almost-cold breakfast.

The part of the story you won’t ever hear is how the reason the food was lukewarm at best that morning was because he spent a solid twenty minutes by the elevator to your floor, berating himself for being so pathetic and chasing after a woman that was probably trying to get rid of him like this, until he realized he might as well take the leap, find out how you really felt about him, and finally approached the door.

It is one of the things that stuck, even if he isn’t sure how or why.

He’d order something from that restaurant whenever you were missing home, and sometimes had them deliver something to you when he wasn’t there; and you’d try your hand at making some Danish treats and meals whenever he isn’t doing well. It is a strange ritual between the two of you, but Ivar has always been grateful for it.

He isn’t that grateful for it now, because he…he cannot accept being this emotional over fucking breakfast and that expectant little smile you grant him. He cannot. He isn’t.

Clearing his throat, he moves forward, asking, “And what did you make, hm?”

Your smile brightens even more, and Ivar’s chest pulls tight at the sight. What the fuck is wrong with him? Why is he so moved by this?

“Birke,” You state, still unbearably proud at the simple little rectangles of dough you have lined up on the baking sheet. Lifting your phone that you still hold in your hand, you explain, “Torvi told me they need to rest there for…like five more minutes.”

Searching for anything to say that doesn’t give away how much this simple gesture, this permanence of that silly little ritual of you even here in Kattegat, has affected him, Ivar meets your gaze and offers a challenge.

“Still scared of trying to make Æggekage, hm?” He teases, chuckling softly at the way your expression immediately morphs into affront.

“I am not scared,” You clarify, petulant. “I’m just…better with things that go in the oven.”

“It goes in the oven, if you finish reading the recipe.”

You make a face at his reminder of the first -and only, so far- time you’ve tried making the omelet-like dish.

“Very funny, Lothbrok,” You deadpan, “You could have told me.”

Ivar shrugs, “Wouldn’t have been as entertaining.”

“You watched me eat raw egg and flour, you dick.”

“Just two bites.”

He opens the fridge and grabs the carton of eggs, passing it to you without a word. Putting your feet back on the ground, you ask,

“What are you doing?”

“I’m teaching you.” He retorts easily, still feeling helplessly exposed right now, even if this -a morning with you, your adorable attempts at trying to win some stupid argument, the soft and disgustingly domestic look of all of it- is by now something he has grown used to, something that has been…permanent, in its own way. Maybe that is why it makes him feel like he’s unraveling at the seams, because he’s faced with the idea that this could be permanent, and he doesn’t have to let go of this idea just yet, because Kattegat couldn’t take you from him, because you want to marry him, because there’s permanence in this, in the two of you.

From your place at his back, you taunt, “Sorry to break it to you, but you are not a good cook, baby.”

Ivar scoffs, but the smile still pulls at his lips.

“Better than you.”

He tells you to get around mixing some of the eggs, while he goes about picking the tomatoes.

Before focusing on your task, you trail a hand over the line of his shoulders, making Ivar stop and tilt his head towards you.

Your hand on his shoulder moves to grasp gently at the underside of his jaw, making him tilt his head further back, and without hesitation you lean down and capture his mouth in yours.

Ivar is still somehow startled by the softness of your kiss, drawing in a sharp breath when your lips press gently against his.

As you pull away your hand drifts down his throat, making him shiver.

“I love you, yeah?” You whisper quietly, searching his gaze.

Ivar nods, maybe a little dumbly, lost in the adoration that so clearly shines in your eyes.

“Yeah,” He confirms just as quietly, clearing his throat when he feels it tightening. “Love you too.”

Satisfied, you move to get a bowl to mix the eggs in, but Ivar stops you, hands on either side of your hips. Leaning down, you rest your weight on his shoulders, hands joined together at the back of his head, and tilt your head in question.

“I’m going to marry you one day.” He promises, searching your eyes as he does, unable to stop himself.

You smile at him, bright and in love and softer than he deserves, and kiss him softly before pulling away.

“You better.”

____ ____ ____

Thank you for reading! I hope this was alright. I’ve spent the better part of a week focusing on this and pulled an all-nighter to finish editing it lol, and I think I’m happy-ish with the result, even tho it might have been a lot, idk.

Anyhow, would love to hear your thoughts, thank you ❤️

Taglist: @youbloodymadgenius​​​ @xbellaxcarolinax​​​ @1950schick​​​ @ietss​​​ @peachyboneless​​​ @encounterthepast​​​ @maggiescarborough​​​ @fae-sedai​​​  @zuxiezendler​​​ @crazybunnyladysworld​​​ @stupiddarkkside​​​ @northumbria​​​  @aprilivar​​​  

[angstymarauder]

His Time of the Month {R.L} (Part 2)

Remus Lupin x Female!reader part 1

summary: You know about your boyfriends lycanthropy and you love him regardless, but sometimes the words he speaks on the days leading up to the full moon still hurt. A lot.  

word count: 1.1kish

contains: angst, troubles with self-worth, ending is left up to interpretation

a/n: the reader has trouble with self-worth in this and I would just like to say that your feelings and self-worth should NEVER EVER rely on the words of others, especially those of your loved ones. I know how hard it is to hear people, who say they love you, ridicule you, and say things that make you feel like shit. And its like - you know they don’t mean to hurt you, but it doesn't change how much pain you feel. I’ve been there (and sometimes I still go there) and while it is a big process filled with tears, cutting people off, arguments defending yourself, and just a lot a lot a lot of self-acceptance, it is possible to stop letting them get to you. YOU are the only validation you need. I love you for who you are and you should love yourself for who you are. My messages are always open, loves <3

He messed up.

And he knew he messed up, but his own mind was working against him and at that moment his rational mind couldn’t overpower the anger that had been building up all day.

Always his enemy, he wanted to blame the lycanthropy, but his rational mind knew that this was all his fault. You have been nothing but loving and understanding about everything when it came to his condition. Night after night you had sat there, taking his screaming and yelling, trying to calm him down, never leaving an argument with unresolved issues, but tonight he watched himself jump over the line that you had pushed back for his time and time again.

Remus stood in the now-empty tower, the sounds of your fading footsteps running down the stairs, each step another ache in his chest. The anger in his mind was screaming at your retreating footsteps. Words of detest, saying that you hated him. That you gave up on him. That you thought he was a monster just like everyone else. But the rational part of his mind sat in the back of his head screaming the truth over all the other noise and he knows he can’t blame you for this. He knows this is his fault. And somehow that idea just made him even angrier.

Angry at his lycanthropy. Angry at the world. Angry at everyone else.

But most of all, he was angry at himself, because he never wanted to hurt you.

Because he doesn't know what he would do without you. Losing you would be the worst thing that could ever happen to him. It would be like ripping all the pieces of his human heart straight out of his chest, leaving only the animalistic urges that show themselves once a month. Without you he might as well never transform back, find a way to stay a werewolf forever.

Suddenly Remus’ senses pick up on footsteps, coming up the stairs this time. He knew whose steps those belonged to, so when James opened the door to the West Tower, Remus was not surprised. Breathlessly, from running up all those stairs, James said “what…. the fuck …. is happening ….up …. here?” taking a breath in between each couple of words.

Running his scarred fingers through his hair, Remus turned to look at his sweaty friend. “I fucked up. I fucked up big time.” He began pacing, the events becoming clearer and more realistic in his mind with each word, “With y/n, I fucked up big time.”

· · · ∞ · · ·

“HE SAID WHAT?” screamed Marlene, now pacing around your shared dorm room, “I’m going to kill that lanky-ass son-of-a-bitch.”

“Marls, please,” Lily spoke softly after glancing at your tired expression. Heartache tends to wear a person out.

The redhead sat down beside you at the edge of your bed, running her hand up and down your back, allowing you to relax a little more. Whispering in your ear so the others didn’t hear, she spoke, “listen, just wait until Tuesday, after the full moon once he’s all cooled down, and then talk to him, ok?”

You nodded at her words even though they barely entered your mind, your head already racing with thoughts you couldn’t bring yourself to say out loud. Lily soon ushered you to sleep, the exhaustion evident in your eyes.

But you couldn’t fall asleep. Questions floating around as your brain sprinted marathons in your head, trying to answer them, and coming up with nothing. Could you ever trust Remus again? How do you know that the next time you fight he won’t say those words again? Did he mean them? Or was it his lycanthropy? How much of these arguments can you even blame on his lycanthropy? And when does it become his fault? You can’t use his lycanthropy as an excuse for everything, but you also don’t want to use it against him….

Did he mean them? That was the question your mind kept circling back around to. Did he mean them? Are your worst fears and deepest insecurities true? Are you good enough? If the person who has told you they’re in love with you, time and time again, doesn’t think so, then how are you supposed to?

Tossing and turning, you woke up, no less tired than the night before. It took effort to get dressed that morning, almost wanting to stay in bed all day, but knowing you couldn’t. Marlene, Lily, and Mary persuaded you to breakfast in the Great Hall. You avoided Remus, in fact, you avoided all of the Marauders. Their presence, only a reminders of your bleeding heart. Remus seemed to be giving you space and, for that, you were grateful. But just the mere sight of him sent you back to your bedroom where you spent the rest of the day, claiming illness to your professors.

· · · ∞ · · ·

It was 3am, you assumed, as you got out of bed. In only your pajamas you quietly made your way through the halls without interruption. Your feet leading you to the top of the astronomy tower where you stared at the sky.

The full moon. Your voice quivered above a whisper as you cast a small silencing spell before allowing sobs to begin escaping your mouth. You thought about Remus as you stared into the moon. Hearing his howls in the distance, you couldn’t help yourself from asking the stars to keep a watch over him.

· · · ∞ · · ·

They found you passed out in the astronomy tower, Lily and Mary, your tear-stained cheeks and dark circles made your previous actions evident. Your roommates came searching for you as soon as they woke up to find your bed empty.

Mary insisted on taking you to the infirmary. Lily, as the only other girl who knew about Remus’ lycanthropy, tried to stop it, but Mary wasn’t hearing it.

Your body began to wake up, your consciousness returning to you slowly, allowing yourself to regain feeling in your fingers and your toes before attempting to open your eyes.

You’ve been in the infirmary plenty of times to visit Remus, but you’ve never been in one of the beds before. You don’t even remember how you got here. Sorting through your memories you last remember being in the astronomy tower staring at… the moon. It was the full moon last night, which means -

“Hey.” He spoke softly. You could feel his eyes staring into your figure. Remus was so surprised when he woke up in the infirmary, the night after one of his worst full moons, to see you two beds over. Your skin lacked its normal shine and tears still stained your beautiful lips. His heart ached over knowing that it was he who caused them. He knows that James said to give you some time, but seeing you here like this, he had to let you know how sorry he was.

You turn to face him, your eyes locking almost instantly, “hey.”

His eyes bore into yours, an expression of complete love, sorrow, and vulnerability filled every inch of them and as he spoke the words, “I’m sorry,” you knew they were true.

lol i was so confused on how to end this and every ending I wrote felt wrong so I'm just gonna leave it up to your imaginations, sorry

[transexualpirate]

“Perfect.”

When he first told Dean, he looked so small and helpless, almost guilty, like he expected Dean to just smack him right in the spot for daring to bring it up. Maybe that's what convinced Dean to participate. Or maybe it was the warmth that painted his cheeks when he imagined Cas smiling brightly at his kid and his... and Dean coming together to make something for him. "Father's Day, huh? Sure. Yeah, why not?" Jack smiled as bright as Cas did in his head.

so uhhhh aparently it’s father’s day in the usa? so i wrote a little something for @dadstielweek​ i hope this is okay <3 also thank you @creepyeyesandfrogs​ for the inspiration ur the best!!!

Summary: Dean and Jack have plans for Cas on father’s day. They also have some unresolved issues.

Warnings: Miscommunication, self worth issues, J*hn Winchester, brief mentions of self destructive tendencies (nothing explicit), brief mentions of sexual themes between Dean and Cas (also not explicit), background Saileen.

also, english is not my native language and i mess up sometimes! i’d much appreciate it if you warn me about any possible mistakes.

"Damn, kid, those are some bright colors you used." it was meant as a jab, but Jack only smiled proudly

"Thank you" he replied "I thought I might be using too much yellow, so his name is written in pink. See?"

Dean did. He stared at the card for a few more seconds. It read "Dad: I feel so safe with you! You always took good care of me and you hold me so gently when I can't sleep. Your the best dad ever!" in yellow, with blue doodles of bees and hearts around it, and "I love you, Castiel" in light pink at the bottom. It wasn't a work of art, but he clearly had fun doing it with some old colorful markers he found around the bunker. It was funny to Dean that a 5'8'' man had done it.

Not a man, he corrected himself. A kid. It was easier to see it in days like these.

"Yeah, it's real pretty, alright. But, uh, just a note-" Jack looked up then, his eyes wide. Dean tried not to be offended about how obvious it was that he was waiting for Dean to back down at any moment "You wrote 'your'. As in, 'your bag', 'your drink', 'your pen', you know. It's 'you're'. Like, 'you are'. You're. You're the best dad ever. Okay?"

"Oh." he looked down again. Stayed silent for a few seconds. Dean imagined he was processing this new information. Then he brought up the yellow marker and fixed it. "There. Is that it?"

"Yup. Looks perfect, kid. Cas is gonna love it."

Jack looked like someone had just told him he could eat all the candy he wanted. Dean found himself chuckling softly at him, then turned back to the cake he was decorating. He was pretty anxious himself. He knew he wasn't the best cook out there, and art also wasn't his strong spot, but he figured that writing "Happy Father's Day" wouldn't be so hard. Jack insisted in some skittles on top of it, too, because "Cas loves colorful things and he even ate some of Jack's last week and seemed to like it!". Dean wasn't so sure. He knew Cas had a weird relationship with food. He didn't need it, and hardly found any he genuinely liked. So he might not eat it at all. Or he might eat it just to make Dean feel good.

But there was something else he had in mind. Something he and Jack had picked in town last week. It was sappy and simple and exactly the kind of thing he never though they’d get to experience.

In the kitchen counter, close to the coffee machine, there was a porcelain mug wrapped with a colorful ribbon. And on it was written “BEST DAD EVER”.

Coffee was something that Cas liked. Especially when it had plenty of sugar. The mug was silly, the kind of thing you’d find at the dollar store, but it made Dean smile just thinking about it. Cas could drink from it everyday. 

Jack followed his gaze and stared at it with a smile. Then he turned to Dean, and to the cake, and seemed to understand something.

“You know he’ll love it too, right?” Dean smiled, but it wasn’t natural anymore. He wasn’t surprised when Jack didn’t buy it. “No, I’m serious. He likes chantilly. He likes chocolate cake. He likes skittles. He loves you. Why wouldn’t he like it?”

 It wasn’t planned at all. It just came out. Easy like that.

He likes all those things. He loves you.

Dean sucked in a breath but before he could reply Jack was staring back at the mug. It seemed like he was already thinking about something else. He was like that, sometimes. Too much energy, a bit like an actual child would have, and not enough place to put it. It wasn’t uncommon for him to lose his train of thought mid sentence. It’s like his own brain was a bit too fast for him.

Dean was like that too, sometimes.

He silently wondered if he should scold him for that, like his own father did to him. But he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Instead, He nudged Jack’s shoulder softly. “Go on. Use plenty of chantilly, ‘kay? You’re right, he likes it.”

Jack didn’t need to be told twice. He hopped to the fridge and got the rest of the chantilly Dean used for the cake. Gently placed the ribbon a little lower on the mug so he could pour something inside it. Turned to the kitchen cabinet and picked up a spoon, and, before Dean, he raised his index finger.

And the coffee machine started working.

Magically.

“Jack!” Dean hissed. He didn’t want to deal with that right now. “Jack, please. Don’t-”

“It’s okay!” he seemed excited “I got it.” he brought a spoonful of chantilly, and the mug floated and stood right in front of him, gravity be damned. “It’s easier this way, I can just-” he held the chantilly container with one hand, the spoon with the other, and the mug was hovering in front of him. There was no way he couldn’t see how that was dangerous.

“Jack, come on,” Dean stopped decorating the cake and reached for the mug “just put it d-”

“Whoa, guys?”

Too many things happened too fast. Sam walked through the kitchen door, rubbing his eyes lazily. Dean flinched. Hard. He thought Cas had discovered them. Jack also flinched, his eyes wide and scared, like he’d been found doing something he shouldn’t be doing. The coffee machine stopped working. The mug fell.

It shattered on the floor, before them.

“Oh, shit.” Sam said, wise as ever.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Come on! Look at it! Goddammit, kid, why did you have to- Come on!”

“Guys? Uh, sorry-” 

“I’m- I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to! I thought- I thought Cas had- I got scared, I’m sorry, Dean, I can fix this, let me just-” he gestured to it, clearly intending to use his powers again, but Dean stopped him, gripping his wrist forcefully with just a little too much strength.

“No. You’ve done enough.” Dean said, his voice cold. He wasn’t sure how exactly things could get worse, but he didn’t want to find out either. Jack struggled to get away from his hold with wobbling lips.

“Dean-” Sam placed a careful hand on his brother’s shoulder “what’s going on?”

“It’s father’s day.” Dean said “We baked a cake and bought Cas a stupid mug but now-” he sighed “the kid used his creepy ass powers and now it’s broken.”

That was like someone had slapped Jack in the face. He finally managed to get his arm free and stepped back like it had burned him. He clutched his wrist, and cried.

“I’m s-sorry...” he managed between sobs.

Dean stared.

He was crying. Outright bawling his eyes out like it was all he knew how to do. If Cas hadn’t slept in Dean’s room (conveniently far away from the kitchen, it was all thought out, that’s definetely the only reason he was there) exhausted from last night’s activities (angels don’t need sleep, per se, but they do benefit from it every now and then if they’re low on grace and already tired from... uh, hunting) he probably would have woken up.

“Oh, shit.” Dean said, for once, somewhat wise.

“I’m sorry, I’m- I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to- I shouldn’t have used th-them. It’s my fault! I didn’t- I didn’t mean-!” he stepped back again, like he was scared anyone would hurt him (or he would hurt anyone).

Dean’s heart dropped to his toes and he wanted to punch himself in the face.

“Shit, kid. No, it’s- Fuck. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have- I shouldn’t have yelled like that. Fuck. Sam, a little help here?”

Sam stared at them for a second, his eyebrows knitted together. 

Dean got mad and went a bit too far. That’s happened before.

It happened a lot with John.

But Dean would always chime in and fix John’s messes for him.

Sam turned around, brought a shovel and a broom and in two swift movements cleaned the remains of the mug while Dean stared at him like he’d grown a second head.

And then he left the kitchen.

“What the fuck. Sam, what the- Sam!” but, obviously, Sam didn’t turn around. It wasn’t that he didnt care. He did. So much. He was scared that if he let them there things would only get worse. But he trusted them- he had to.

Dean and Jack needed to have this conversation by themselves.

Jack. The Jack that was pressed up against the wall crying desperately like there’s no tomorrow. Dean wanted to cry too.

“Kid. Jack. Jack, I’m sorry. Hey, listen to me.” he took a careful step but Jack didn’t even seem to notice. He was clutching his own wrist so hard Dean was scared he was going to break the skin. 

He raised his hand and slowly reached for his wrist. Jack flinched again and looked up to Dean like he was surprised that he was so close. Slowly, like he was trying to approach a wild animal, Dean held the kid’s hand and opened it, forcing him to let go.

“There we go. Careful, kiddo. You were hurting yourself.”

Jack scoffed, or tried to, but as he hadn’t stopped crying yet it sounded a little like a scared cat. “Right. Like I d-don’t deserve it.”

“No.” Dean’s voice was suddenly rough again “No, you don’t. Kid- Jack, look at me.”

Jack didn’t want to, but Dean reached for his chin softly and, carefully, as if the Nephilim was made of glass, he brought his face up.

“I-I ruined it, Dean. I broke the mug.”

“Yeah.” his voice was soft again “You did. But it’s okay. You didn’t do it on purpose. You got scared. You shouldn’t have been so careless, but you didn’t mean to do it. I know you didn’t. Okay? You just have to be more careful next time. It’s fine. You’re fine, okay? I’m... I’m sorry I yelled. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Jack stared at him. His lips were slightly parted and his face was still tear stained. Dean ran his thumbs through his cheekbones, drying his tears softly. Jack let him.

“I’m sorry, Dean. I shouldn’t have... Used them. My- my creepy powers.”

“No, Jack, it’s okay. Those powers, they’re not creepy, okay? They’ve helped so many people before. They’ve saved us. And they’re a part of you, and you’re not creepy, okay? You’re not. I’m sorry I said that. I was wrong. And I shouldn’t have- Shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry, Jack.”

Jack looked like he was waiting for the punchline. He studied Dean’s face, and eventually he stuttered out “It’s... It’s okay, Dean.”

“We both fucked up, huh?” he chuckled softly, and Jack did so too.

“Yeah. I guess- I guess we did.”

“Well, I’m the adult. I can’t let this happen again. I’m not going to. Okay? I’ll be more careful too. I just- I lost it, Jack. I’m so, so sorry. I hope you know how wrong I was. You’re not bad, Jack. You didn’t do this on purpose. You were just trying to be faster. It’s okay. You made a small mistake. It’s no biggie. I need to keep it cool next time, okay?”

“No! No, there won’t be a next time, Dean. I’ll be more careful, I promise!”

Dean smiled. “I know, Jack, I know you will. But you’re four. You’re gonna make silly mistakes like this. Your job is to try a little more everyday. Okay?”

Jack nodded enthusiastically. “I will. I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will, little guy. I will, too, okay?”

“Okay.” 

“I promise, too.” Jack smiled at that. Dean swept his hair from his face, leaned in and kissed the kid’s forehead. He beamed. And then he stopped. Dean glanced at his face.

“But, Dean... It’s, it’s broken, now. We only have the cake and the card.”

“Well, I’m sure he’ll love them, Jack.”

“Yeah, but... It’s... It’s Cas, Dean. He deserves better.”

Dean contemplated for a second. And then he smiled. Jack tilted his head in a very Cas-like fashion.

“I have an idea.”

Cas turned around in Dean’s bed, hoping to find the man laying next to him. He didn’t. 

It wasn’t unnexpected, you see, Dean woke up early everyday. Cas wasn’t used to sleeping, but when he did, he slept in late. He only needs his four hours after all. But honestly, Cas couldn’t help but wonder if there was some shame in there.

He glanced around the room and decided it would be best if he got dressed. He got up, groaning softly, then retrieved his underwear and pants from Dean’s desk. His shirt was on the ground. Tie and trenchcoat were perched on a chair. His cellphone was on his pocket. He thought about going out, maybe make Jack some breakfast, but it was still early and the kid was probably asleep. So he decided to go back to bed (without his trenchcoat, mind you, not even he is that formal).

Immediately as he laid down there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” he slurred out, still sleepy.

Whoever was on the other side hesitated. “Are you... Decent?”

Cas couldn’t stop his smile. “Yeah, Dean, I’m decent.”

“No, like... Jack- Jack is here, Cas.”

There was a laugh on the other side. “Dude?” Sam whispered. Cas decided to pretend he didn’t hear him.

“Come in, Dean. Unless you want me to put on my shoes as well.”

The door opened and the first thing Cas noticed is that Dean’s whole face was red as a tomato. The second thing was that he was holding a cake covered in chantilly and skittles and the third is that he was followed by Jack and Sam.

Oh, no, did he forget anyone’s birthday?

But they didn’t sing. Instead, Jack jumped on the bed, holding something colorful. Sam was right behind him, holding a wooden platform and placing it on the bed. It was like a support so nothing would fall. Dean put the cake on the platform and Jack placed something too.

Cas blinked.

“Uh, wh-what’s... Did I... Miss something?”

“It’s Father’s Day!!” Jack beamed. Cas couldn’t help but mirror his smile. But he was still a bit confused.

“O-okay, so...?” Jack leaped at him, involving him in a hug.

“Happy Father’s Day, dad!”

Oh. Oh! “Jack!”

“Kid’s super excited. It’s your first Father’s day without an apocalypse, after all. So, we... Yeah. We did something.” Dean tried to explain. He scratched the back of his head awkwardly. Cas stared at him like he’d personally brought him the moon.

“They did something for you, too, Cas. Look!” Sam pointed at the colorful package at the improvised table. He noticed, then, that it wasn’t a package. 

It was a mug involved by a colorful ribbon. The one he usually used. It used to be white and bland. But now, there was a blue tie doodled on it, and in Dean’s unmistakable handwriting it was written “WORLD’S BEST DAD”. It was filled with coffee and chantilly, just the way he likes it.

Cas held it in his hands and couldn’t stop the tears flooding his face. 

For a second, Jack panicked. His eyes widened and he looked between Cas and Dean questioningly. Dean reached a hand to his shoulder and whispered “I think he likes it, Champ.”

“But- But he’s crying?”

Cas sniffed loudly, then. He couldn’t explain it. He didn’t expect it. World’s best dad, him? “They’re... T-they’re tears of joy, Jack.”

Sam giggled sofly. He brought his cellphone up and started recording. He was happy he did, because just at that moment, Dean leaned down and kissed him wholeheartedly.

Like, on the lips. Full on romantic kiss. The type they show on TV. 

If Jack was surprised, he didn’t show it. But he was happy, that was clear. Sam, however, cheered them on. “Oh, fucking finally!”

Dean showed the camera his middle finger. Jack tilted his head again, and Sam zoomed in on him, mumbling something about “like father, like son”. When they broke apart, their pupils blown and panting softly, Dean cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck. Cas was at loss for words.

Jack seemed to remember something, then, and shoved his card on Cas’ face with no mercy. “Oh, oh! I also made a card! And Dean baked the cake! We painted the mug together. He taught me how to draw a tie. Do you like it?” 

“Liked it? Jack, I love it. Look at it! You drew a bee, too! It’s so pretty.” he sighed contented while Dean tried to steal Sam’s phone only to find he had already sent the video to Eileen. Jack stared at him with childlike wonder, and Cas was almost scared for a moment because of how happy he was. But it was okay. He was allowed to be happy. He deserved it. “I love it. Thank you, so much. All of you. It’s perfect- you’re perfect.” he turned to Dean, with Sam’s hand on his shoulder as he cooed childishly. “I love you, Dean.” And then he turned to Jack, the kid smiling in blissful, childish naivety. “And I love you, son.”

“See?” Dean grinned, nudging Jack playfully “I told you he’d love it.”

[alltheworldsinmyhead]

Alright, let’s make some things clear, once and for all, because this clusterfuck is delightful: 

FEYRE has all the reasons to harbour hard feelings towards Nesta. They do have unresolved conflict which none of the parts really know how to resolve. You could even argue that Feyre does not owe Nesta any kind of attention or care now and I would be kinda inclined to agree. What was truly shitty of Feyre was to actually BANISH her own sister from her fairytale ending just because she did not fit the perfect picture and hand her to Cass like an object.

RHYS is completely justified in his dislike towards Nesta. He is so devoted to Feyre that he will always and forever take her side in any potential conflit AND, due to this devotion, is not likely for him to forgive other people for inflicting pain on Feyre, even when she herself does grant this forgiveness. Rhysand doesn’t need to like or even understand Nesta - she’s his sister-in-law, he grants her protection on basis of that and so be it. To be honest, I don’t think it’s Rhysand’s cup of tea at all.

MOR does not have to like Nesta. Actually, she has hundreds of reasons not to and it would have been super unrealistic if she did. I don’t think that in 500 years of this Mor-Az-Cass clusterfuck there has ever been a bigger threat to this comfortable bubble of denial they have created than Nesta. Besides, Feyre is Mor’s bestie and her High Lady, so her loyality will always be with Feyre first and foremost. HOWEVER, I do believe Mor is intentionally doeing everything she can to create drift between Cassian and Nesta and, unfortunately, I think it has more to do with her own fear and insecurity than with her trying to protect him from heartbreak or sth. And this is - and incredibly selfish thing to do and also an incredibly wrong one. And it needs to be adressed.

AZRIEL did nothing wrong, fuck, SJM, give this man a hug pls

ELAIN is the one whom I actually DO have a problem with, because given how absolutely devoted Nesta is to her, you would think Elain would fight for her harder. She doesn’t. She fought for fucking GRAYSEN, but she doesn’t fight for Nesta. I believe that she is the most self-centered one in this whole mess, tbh. I can forgive Feyre for her conflict with Nesta, but never Elain.  

CASSIAN is a fucking coward. There, I said it. He is in love with Nesta, she fucking calls to him, body and soul, and yet he refuses to fight for her, much like Elain does. He gives up on her and cannot deal with his own emotions to the the point when he fucking tells Nesta she’s unlovable. I adore this man, but damn, he will have to atone for that hard. Because boiiii, SHE MADE HER FEELINGS FOR YOU AS CLEAR AS POSSIBLE. He needs to seriously set his priorities straight - cause as of acofas, he refuses to completely let her go while simultaniously refusing to committ to her. He refuses to understand her actions. He blames his own feelings on her.  And I think that - again - this is all because he is so damn afraid of loving her the way he full well knows she simply has to be loved - completely and apologetically - cause loving her like that will put him in oposition to his own family. And who he is, if he is not absolutely devoted to them? 

NESTA  - honestly, let this girl heal. She is so broken and ruined in acofas and I do truly think she only continues to live because Fae bodies are so hard to kill. I don’t think she owes Cassian anything. She offered him her raw heart already. I don’t think she owes Elain more. She gave her her heart long ago. I don’t think she owes Mor or Rhys anything, besides being more civil with them. She does owe Feyre a completely honest conversation about their shared past, but, truth to be told, what she has already said to her in ACOTAR should’ve been at least enough for Feyre to start looking at her at least a bit differently ( which she didn;t). She is clearly mentally ill and depressed, and you cannot expect a person in such a ruined state to be a proactive part of any kind of relationship, romantic of otherwise. How fandom treats her depression in opossition to Feyre’s only shows that, unfortunately, a woman still has to be nice and sympathetic in order to be even considered worth care and affection. 

Guys. They DON’T NEED TO ALL LIKE EACH OTHER. Nesta doesn’t need to enjoy Rhys’ company. She doesn’t need to be besties with Mor. The true conflict is not between Nesta and IC, not even at all. Nesta probably does not belong in the Court of Dreams in a straigh-forward sense, definitely not like Feyre does. Nesta and Cassian don’t have true conflict either, because they so clearly love each other, they just cannot be together for the time being because of their own personal conflicts - Nesta’s with her own issues and with her sisters AND Cassian’s with his own issues and with the IC. 

And that’s the tea.  

[asherlockstudy]

Rhett and Link’s problems with the Enneagram

I have now watched both Enneagram EBs and the second one actually set my gears to work (So Anon here it comes! I promise it was spontaneous).

After listening to Link and mostly Rhett talk about the Enneagram again and again, I realised I have a problem but I can not place its exact root. There is either something fundamentally wrong with the Enneagram itself or maybe it’s Rhett and consequently Link who talk about it in a way that made me feel a little uncomfortable.

My problem and cause of concern was that everything that was said during the two podcasts had a clear negative tone to it. I will have to bring in myself to it to give you an example so bear with me for a paragraph. I did the test and I am a 5 (Investigator - Observer, something like that) which suits me rather well, especially since it agrees perfectly with my Myers-Briggs INTP type. The results said I was a 5w6 (essentially an emotionless analytical robot) which is definitely wrong as I am clearly a 5w4 (a sad mess who analyses the world and searches pointlessly for the true meanings in life and wants to come up with the ultimate all-encompassing philosophy). I mean, OK, they are not described exactly like that but trust me, that’s the point. But despite all the flaws associated with it, especially in the fields of socialising and tremendous procrastination due to an insane fear of failure, I am actually very much in touch with it. I revel in analysing, in trying to see the bigger picture, to make up my own theory about life and the world. It gives me fuel to go on, it fills me with excitement, it gives me a purpose.

Now, what I kept hearing from Rhett and Link are the things they would hope to run away from. I can’t seem to remember a single positive thing they said about their personalities. All traits they mentioned ( which were all pretty one-dimensional for both I dare say) were presented in the context of torturing them and having to confront them. With these insights in their personalities and the spiritual deconstructions earlier, their old (surprising back then) statement that they are “fundamentally sad people” makes more and more sense. Some of their traits, like Link’s care for perfection to the smallest detail and his moral concerns could have been neutral or positive but, no, they are almost all given as clear negatives or at least as things that have an emotional toll on them.

This gives me the impression that Link and especially Rhett have found comfort in studying the Enneagram and try to find an explanation for what they are like, to feel part of a group, represented in their misery. In short, they focus on the analysis of the flaws of their personalities as a part of who they are and avoid dealing with the root that caused said flaws. Link is more self aware while Rhett still struggles to reach the root of it, which is his childhood. Not that he doesn’t know it but he can’t just deal with the people and the situations that impacted him enough to make him a three. For instance, Rhett seems to believe that he is a natural three that his parents made manifest even more strongly. It could be the case or the threeness we observe in him is the direct product of his parents’ constant judgement. By keeping chanting he needs to “be” instead of “do”, I am not sure Rhett will achieve much. Honestly, the one impactful step he needs to take is to stop caring about what his father thinks and I am sorry to say he is still not near achieving this. Especially when I take into account how scared he was during his videocall with his dad in GMM and how relieved he looked after the call was over without drama. In short, my problem with their take in the Enneagram is that it seems that Three is Rhett’s pack of unresolved issues rather than his complete personality type.

Furthermore, Rhett speaks knowingly about all numbers / personality types which proves he consumes passionately all Enneagram information that is available. For a man of his level of active lifestyle, hectic schedule and impatience, this shows that he indeed seeks comfort in finding a detailed description and an explanation for his personality, for the way he feels and acts. What does this mean? Well, that he does not like the way he feels about himself a lot. Not only that, but he is actually in a search of self. At this point, he is no longer cryptic about it but it is more serious than he lets on. He tries to make sense of himself and he tries desperately to find something in himself to love. I hope there are people in his life who let him know that he is worthy of their love, friendship and appreciation even though he is so deep inside his head that even the affectionate feedback can only help so much. Rhett will start finding some peace only if he takes the one step I mentioned above.

And then it seems that Link’s personality type is also exclusively a byproduct of his childhood and is aggravated by his relationship with Rhett. Link’s perfectionism doesn’t cause him enthusiasm - he just dreads the disturbance of his supposedly perfectly stable world. In all honesty, Link doesn’t strike me as an ambitious person. Link would just love to have his dear routine and a loyal person to share it with. Link needs stability and companionship. He is fine with just one person as long as this person contributes to the stability of their bond. Who that one person is in Link’s life is another story…

Link doesn’t care that much about the creative process and, frankly, he doesn’t care all that much about the comedy. Link cares to keep the environment Rhett and he work stable and safe. For Link, judgement from the audience is not as alarming as Rhett’s frustration because of it. Link cares to ensure that Rhett’s idea will be successful enough to keep working and to keep working together. So Link’s entire self-identification as a one seems to stem from his fear of abandonment and worthlessness only. Link fears he has not much to contribute to Mythical and he tries to counteract that by becoming the ultimate source of management and control. Because if he didn’t even manage the company, then what would Rhett need him for? Hence, Link’s obsession for control is a consequence of his fear, he doesn’t necessarily love to be in control for the sake of it. This is proven by his plane example, which shows that he finally relaxes when he does NOT need to be in control.

Link has been working hard most of his life to ensure his position next to Rhett. This brings even more insight in his resentment for Rhett that explodes from time to time. Link resents Rhett because he tries so hard to be always by his side but due to Rhett’s opportunitism, he can’t tell whether Rhett wants his companionship or he simply needs it for their brand. Even worse, Link dreads that the reason Rhett is his friend is because Link feeds his ego with his loyalty and admiration, because he takes Link for granted and not because he loves Link for who he is.

“Do you care for me or do you revel in the fact that I care for you?”

Now, I can’t get inside Rhett’s head but I doubt he uses people. I believe his genuine care for Link can be found in the weirdest examples - those from which Rhett has nothing to gain i.e getting frustrated when Link doesn’t enjoy food as much. Yes, this is a sign of love. Rhett enjoys food so much that he wants to share that enjoyment with Link. He can’t realise Link’s tongue works differently - he thinks Link is missing out and it frustrates him. Another silly example is Rhett buying Apocalypse equipment for a clearly disinterested Link and probably never getting its money’s worth back. This is important to Rhett for some reason and he is concerned enough to protect careless Link as well despite having no personal gain from it.

The truth is that these two men feed off each other; Rhett keeps Link attached to him to always feel worthy and Link keeps Rhett attached to him to always feel safe. However, the fact that Rhett is almost his entire source of safety and that Link is Rhett’s biggest calibrator of worth is indicative of the levels of love and need. Nevertheless, Rhett and Link are not independent people. They were constantly in search of support from one another and they lost themselves in the process of satisfying others or being safe. This is something they are realising only now.

Link’s fear of abandonment is so big that it frequently leads him to an almost paranoid behaviour. It is crazy that he felt left out when Rhett communicated with the audience during a podcast whose key purpose is to… communicate with the audience. His fear here has two sides: 1) that Rhett didn’t consider him an equally important business partner so he preferred to speak directly to the audience and 2) that Rhett isn’t emotionally invested in him in order to open up to him. And by saying he can deceive people if he needs, Rhett doesn’t help Link overcome his huge insecurities. This is why Link begs Rhett to talk to him about his feelings more. He does not understand whether Rhett loves him or uses him. The notion that Rhett doesn’t truly love or appreciate him is one of his biggest fears in life.

As for Rhett, it is certainly huge growth that he starts opening up and being vulnerable to a few thousand strangers yet it all still derives from his need to be accepted by said strangers as I am afraid that the late disproportionate criticism he gets for silly stuff on Twitter and Tumblr surely don’t help him deal with his issues, no matter how hard he tries. Therefore, Rhett is trapped in a vicious circle. Besides, Rhett was overly sensitive to be hurt when Link stated the obvious; that he was being vulnerable in hopes to be understood and accepted, because that was clearly what Rhett was openly doing. However, having someone discussing openly his vulnerability immediately made Rhett retreat back to his shell because no matter how hard he tries, Rhett hasn’t managed to separate vulnerability from weakness in his mind yet.

Long story short, Rhett and Link might be Three and One respectively but I am not sure they have a good understanding of themselves anyway. They may have figured out their types correctly but they certainly narrow their entire sense of being to their unresolved issues and phobias. They entirely lack a sense of self-worth and they probably have not realised the extent of the traumas in their youth. In the Enneagram language, the nine personality types have nine levels of development. I believe Rhett and Link are either in the average levels or the mildest unhealthy level. They are certainly not in the healthy top three levels.

Their obsession with the Ennegram helps only superficially but they seem to have based an illogically huge part of their self exploration on it. The Enneagram might offer some insight but won’t offer the resolutions they long for and badly need in order to find some relief. The ones that come when you confront your environment instead of overanalysing yourself and beating yourself up because of it.

[letterboxd]

Careful How You Go.

Ella Kemp explores how film lovers can protect themselves from distressing subject matter while celebrating cinema at its most audacious.

Featuring Empire magazine editor Terri White, Test Pattern filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford, writer and critic Jourdain Searles, publicist Courtney Mayhew, and curator, activist and producer Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View collective.

This story contains discussion of rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-harm, trauma and loss of life, as well as spoilers for ‘Promising Young Woman’ and ‘A Star is Born’.

We film lovers are blessed with a medium capable of excavating real-life emotion from something seemingly fictional. Yet, for all that film is—in the oft-quoted words of Roger Ebert—an “empathy machine”, it’s also capable of deeply hurting its audience when not wielded by its makers and promoters with appropriate care. Or, for that matter, when not approached by viewers with informed caution.

Whose job is it to let us know that we might be upset by what we see? With the coronavirus pandemic decimating the communal movie-going experience, the way we accommodate each viewer’s sensibilities is more crucial than ever—especially when so many of us are watching alone, at home, often unsupported.

In order to understand how we can champion a film’s content and take care of its audience, I approached women in several areas of the movie ecosystem. I wanted to know: how does a filmmaker approach the filming of a rape and its aftermath? How does a magazine editor navigate the celebration of a potentially triggering movie in one of the world’s biggest film publications? How does a freelance writer speak to her professional interests while preserving her personal integrity? How does a women’s film collective create a safe environment for an audience to process such a film? And, how does a publicist prepare journalists for careful reporting, when their job is to get eyeballs on screens in order to keep our favorite art form afloat?

The conversations reminded me that the answers are endlessly complex. The concerns over spoilers, the effectiveness of trigger warnings, the myriad ways in which art is crafted from trauma, and the fundamental question of whose stories these are to tell. These questions were valid decades ago, they will be for decades to come, and they feel especially urgent now, since a number of recent tales helmed by female and non-binary filmmakers depict violence and trauma involving women’s bodies in fearless, often challenging ways.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, in particular, has revived a vital conversation about content consideration, as victims and survivors of sexual assault record wildly different reactions to its astounding ending. Shatara Michelle Ford’s quietly tense debut, Test Pattern, brings Black survivors into the conversation. And the visceral, anti-wish-fulfillment horror Violation, coming soon from Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, takes the rape-revenge genre up another notch.

These films come off the back of other recent survivor stories, such as Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking series I May Destroy You (which centers women’s friendship in a narrative move that, as Sarah Williams has eloquently outlined, happens too rarely in this field). Also: Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman, and the ongoing ugh-ness of The Handmaid’s Tale. And though this article is focused on plots centering women’s trauma, I acknowledge the myriad of stories that can be triggering in many ways for all manner of viewers. So whether you’ve watched one of these titles, or others like them, I hope you felt supported in the conversations to follow, and that you feel seen.

Weruche Opia and Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

Simply put, Promising Young Woman is a movie about a woman seeking revenge against predatory men. Except nothing about it is simple. Revenge movies have existed for aeons, and we’ve rooted for many promising young (mostly white) women before Carey Mulligan’s Cassie (recently: Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, Noelle in Natalia Leite’s M.F.A.). But in Promising Young Woman, the victim is not alive to seek revenge, so it becomes Cassie’s single-minded crusade. Mercifully, we never see the gang-rape that sparks Cassie’s mission. But we do see a daring, fatal subversion of the notion of a happy ending—and this is what has audiences of Emerald Fennell’s jaw-dropping debut divided.

“For me, being a survivor, the point is to survive,” Jourdain Searles tells me. The New York-based critic, screenwriter, comedian—and host of Netflix’s new Black Film School series—says the presence of death in Promising Young Woman is the problem. “One of the first times I spoke openly about [my assault], I made the decision that I didn’t want to go to the police, and I got a lot of judgment for that,” she says. “So watching Promising Young Woman and seeing the police as the endgame is something I’ve always disagreed with. I left thinking, ‘How is this going to help?’”

“I feel like I’ve got two hats on,” says Terri White, the London-based editor-in chief of Empire magazine, and the author of a recently published memoir, Coming Undone. “One of which is me creating a magazine for a specific film-loving audience, and the other bit of me, which has written a book about trauma, specifically about violence perpetrated against the body. They’re not entirely siloed, but they are two distinct perspectives.”

White loved both Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You, because they “explode the myth of resolution and redemption”. She calls the ending of Promising Young Woman “radical” in the way it speaks to the reality of what happens to so many women. “I was thinking about me and women like me, women who have endured violence and injury or trauma. Three women every week are still killed [in the UK] at the hands of an ex-partner, or somebody they know intimately, or a current partner. Statistically, any woman who goes for some kind of physical confrontation in [the way Cassie does] would end up dying.”

She adds: “I felt like the film was in service to both victims and survivors, and I use the word ‘victims’ deliberately. I call myself a victim because I think if you’ve endured either sexual violence or physical violence or both, a lot of empowering language, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t reflect the reality of being a victim or a survivor, whichever way you choose to call yourself.” This point has been one many have disagreed on. In a way, that makes sense—no victim or survivor can be expected to speak to anyone else’s experience but their own.

Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell on the set of ‘Promising Young Woman’.

Likewise, there is no right or wrong way to feel about this film, or any film. But a question that arises is, well, should everyone have to see a film to figure that out? And should victims and survivors of sexual violence watch this film? “I have definitely been picky about who I’ve recommended it to,” Courtney Mayhew says. “I don’t want to put a friend in harm’s way, even if that means they miss out on something awesome. It’s not worth it.”

Mayhew is a New Zealand-based international film publicist, and because of her country’s success in controlling Covid 19, she is one of the rare people able to experience Promising Young Woman in a sold-out cinema. “It was palpable. Everyone was so engaged and almost leaning forwards. There were a lot of laughs from women, but it was also a really challenging setting. A lot of people looking down, looking away, and there was a girl who was crying uncontrollably at the end.”

“Material can be very triggering,” White agrees. “It depends where people are personally in their journey. When I still had a lot of trauma I hadn’t worked through in my 20s, I found certain things very difficult to watch. Those things are a reality—but people can make their own decisions about the material they feel able to watch.”

It’s about warning, and preparation, more than total deprivation, then? “I believe in giving people information so they can make the best choice for themselves,” White says. “But I find it quite reductive, and infantilizing in some respects, to be told broadly, ‘Women who have experienced x shouldn’t watch this.’ That underestimates the resilience of some people, the thirst for more information and knowledge.” (This point is clearly made in this meticulous, awe-inspiring list by Jenn, who is on a journey to make sense of her trauma through analysis of rape-revenge films.) But clarity is crucial, particularly for those grappling with unresolved issues.

Searles agrees Promising Young Woman can be a difficult, even unpleasant watch, but still one with value. “As a survivor it did not make me feel good, but it gave me a window into the way other people might respond to your assault. A lot of the time [my friends] have reacted in ways I don’t understand, and the movie feels like it’s trying to make sense of an assault from the outside, and the complicated feelings a friend might have.”

Molly Parker and Vanessa Kirby in ‘Pieces of a Woman’.

* * *

A newborn dies. A character is brutally violated. A population is tortured. To be human is to bear witness to history, but it’s still painful when that history is yours, or something very close to it. “Some things are hard to watch because you relate to them,” Searles explains. “I find mother! hard to watch, and there’s no actual sexual assault. But I just think of sexual assault and trauma and domestic abuse, even though the film isn’t about that. The thing is, you could read an academic paper on patriarchy—you don’t need to watch it on a show [or in a film] if you don’t want to.”

White agrees: “I’ve never been able to watch Nil by Mouth, because I grew up in a house of domestic violence and I find physical violence against women on screen very hard to watch. But that doesn’t mean I think the film shouldn’t be shown—it should still exist, I’ve just made the choice not to watch it.” (Reader, since our conversation, she watched it. At 2:00am.)

“I know people who do not watch Promising Young Woman or The Handmaid’s Tale because they work for an NGO in which they see those things literally in front of their eyes,” Mayhew says. “It could be helpful for someone who isn’t aware [of those issues], but then what is the purpose of art? To educate? To entertain? For escapism? It’s probably all of those.”

Importantly, how much weight should an artist’s shoulders carry, when it comes to considering the audiences that will see their work? There’s a general agreement among my interviewees that, as White says, “filmmakers have to make the art that they believe in”. I don’t think any film lover would disagree, but, suggests Searles, “these films should be made with survivors in mind. That doesn’t mean they always have to be sensitive and sad and declawed. But there is a way to be provocative, while leaning into an emotional truth.”

Madeleine Sims-Fewer in ‘Violation’.

Violation, about which I’ll say little here since it is yet to screen at SXSW (ahead of its March 25 release on Shudder) is not at all declawed, and is certainly made with survivors in mind—in the sense that in life, unlike in movies, catharsis is very seldom possible no matter how far you go to find it. On Letterboxd, many of those who saw Violation at TIFF and Sundance speak of feeling represented by the rape-revenge plot, writing: “One of the most intentionally thought out and respectful of the genre… made by survivors for survivors” and “I feel seen and held”. (Also: “This movie is extremely hard to watch, completely on purpose.”)

“Art can do great service to people,” agrees White, “If, by consequence, there is great service for people who have been in that position, that’s a brilliant consequence. But I don’t believe filmmakers and artists should be told that they are responsible for certain things. There’s a line of responsibility in terms of being irresponsible, especially if your community is young, or traumatised.”

Her words call to mind Bradley Cooper’s reboot of A Star is Born, which many cinephiles knew to be a remake and therefore expected its plot twist, but young filmgoers, drawn by the presence of Lady Gaga, were shocked (and in some cases triggered) by a suicide scene. When it was released, Letterboxd saw many anguished reviews from younger members. In New Zealand, an explicit warning was added to the film’s classification by the country’s chief censor (who also created an entirely new ‘RP18’ classification for the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which eventually had a graphic suicide scene edited out two years after first landing on the streaming service).

“There is a duty of care to audiences, and there is also a duty of care to artists and filmmakers,” says Mayhew. “There’s got to be some way of meeting in the middle.” The middle, perhaps, can be identified by the filmmaker’s objective. “It’s about feeling safe in the material,” says Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View film collective, which curates and markets films by women in order to effect industry change. “With material like this, it’s beholden on creatives to interrogate their own intentions.”

Filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford is “forever interrogating” ideas of power. Their debut feature, Test Pattern, deftly examines the power differentials that inform the foundations of consent. “As an artist, human, and person who has experienced all sorts of boundary violation, assault and exploitation in their life, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about power… It is something I grapple with in my personal life, and when I arrive in any workplace, including a film set.”

In her review of Test Pattern for The Hollywood Reporter, Searles writes, “This is not a movie about sexual assault as an abstract concept; it’s a movie about the reality of a sexual assault survivor’s experience.” Crucially, in a history of films that deal largely with white women’s experiences, Test Pattern “is one of the few sexual-assault stories to center a Black woman, with her Blackness being central to her experience and the way she is treated by the people around her.”

Brittany S. Hall in ‘Test Pattern’.

* * *

Test Pattern follows the unfolding power imbalance between Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and her devoted white boyfriend Evan (Will Brill), as he drives her from hospital to hospital in search of a rape kit, after her drink was spiked by a white man in a bar who then raped her. Where Promising Young Woman is a millennial-pink revenge fantasy of Insta-worthy proportions, Test Pattern feels all too real, and the cops don’t come off as well as they do in the former.

Ford does something very important for the audience: they begin the film just as the rape is about to occur. We do not see it at this point (we do not really ever see it), but we know that it happened, so there’s no chance that, somewhere deeper into the story, when we’re much more invested, we’ll be side-swiped by a sudden onslaught of sexual violence. In a way, it creates a safe space for our journey with Renesha.

It’s one of many thoughtful decisions made by Ford throughout the production process. “I’m in direct conversation with film and television that chooses to depict violence against women so casually,” Ford tells me. “I intentionally showed as little of Renesha’s rape as humanly possible. I also had an incredibly hard time being physically present for that scene, I should add. What I did shoot was ultimately guided by Renesha’s experience of it. Shoot only what she would remember. Show only what she would have been aware of.

“But I also made it clear that this was a violation of her autonomy, by allowing moments where we have an arm’s length point of view. I let the camera sit with the audience, as I’m also saying, as the filmmaker, this happened, and you saw enough of it to know. This, for me, is a larger commentary on how we treat victims of assault and rape. I do not believe for one goddamn minute that we need to see the actual, literal violence to know what happened. When we flagrantly replicate the violence in film and television, we are supporting the cultural norm of needing ‘all of the evidence’—whatever that means—to ‘believe women’.”

Ford’s intentional work in crafting the romance and unraveling of Test Pattern’s leading couple pays off on screen, but their stamp as an invested and careful director also shows in their work with Drew Fuller, the actor who played Mike, the rapist. “It’s a very difficult role, and I’m grateful to him for taking it so seriously. When discussing and rendering the practice and non-practice of consent intentionally, I found it helpful to give it a clear definition and provide conceptual insight.

“I sent Drew a few articles that I used as tools to create a baseline understanding when it comes to exploring consent and power on screen. At the top of that list was Lili Loofbourow’s piece, The female price of male pleasure and Zhana Vrangalova's Teen Vogue piece, Everything You Need to Know about Consent that You Never Learned in Sex Ed. The latter in my opinion is the linchpin. There’s also Jude Elison Sady Doyle’s piece about the whole Aziz Ansari thing, which is a great primer.”

Sidney Flanigan in ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’.

Even when a filmmaker has given Ford’s level of care and attention to their project, what happens when the business end of the industry gets involved in the art? As we well know, marketing is a film’s window dressing. It has one job: to get eyeballs into the cinema. It can’t know if every viewer should feel safe to enter.

It would be useful, with certain material, to know how we should watch, and with whom, and what might we need in the way of support coming out. Whose job is it to provide this? Beyond the crude tool of an MPAA rating (and that’s a whole sorry tale for another day), there are many creative precautions that can be taken across the industry to safeguard a filmgoer’s experience.

Mayhew, who often sees films at the earliest stages (sometimes before a final cut, sometimes immediately after), speaks to journalists in early screenings and ensures they have the tools to safely report on the topics raised. In New Zealand, reporters are encouraged to read through resources to help them guide their work. Mayhew’s teams would also ensure journalists would be given relevant hotline numbers, and would ask media outlets to include them in published stories.

“It’s not saying, ‘You have to do this’,” she explains, “It’s about first of all not knowing what the journalist has been through themselves, and second of all, [if] they are entertainment reporters who haven’t navigated speaking about sexual assault, you only hope it will be helpful going forward. It’s certainly not done to infantilize them, because they’re smart people. It’s a way to show some care and support.”

The idea of having appropriate resources to make people feel safe and encourage them to make their own decisions is a priority for Bays and Birds’ Eye View, as well. The London-based creative producer and cultural activist stresses the importance of sharing such a viewing experience. “It’s the job of cinemas, distributors and festivals to realize that it might not be something the filmmaker does, but as the people in control of the environment it’s our job to give extra resources to those who want it,” says Bays. “To give people a safe space to come down from the experience.”

Pre-pandemic, when Birds’ Eye View screened Kitty Green’s The Assistant, a sharp condemnation of workplace micro-aggressions seen through the eyes of one female assistant, they invited women who had worked for Harvey Weinstein. For a discussion after Eliza Hittman’s coming-of-ager Never Rarely Sometimes Always, abortion experts were able to share their knowledge. “It’s about making sure the audience knows you can say anything here, but that it’s safe,” Bays explains. “It’s kind of like group therapy—you don’t know people, so you’re not beholden to what they think about you. And in the cinema people aren’t looking at you. You’re speaking somewhat anonymously, so a lot of really important stuff can come out.”

The traditional movie-going experience, involving friends, crowds and cathartic, let-loose feelings, is still largely inaccessible at the time of writing. Over the past twelve months we’ve talked plenty about preserving the magic of the big screen experience, but it’s about so much more than the romanticism of an art form; it’s also about the safety that comes from a feeling of community when watching potentially upsetting movies.

“The going in and coming out parts of watching a film in the cinema are massively important, because it’s like coming out of the airlock and coming back to reality,” says Bays. “You can’t do that at home. Difficult material kind of stays with you.” During the pandemic, Birds’ Eye View has continued to provide the same wrap-around curatorial support for at-home viewers as they would at an in-person event. “If we’re picking a difficult film and asking people to watch it at home, we might suggest you watch it with a friend so you can speak about it afterwards,” Bays says.

Julia Garner in ‘The Assistant’.

But, then, how can we still find this sense of community without the physical closeness? “It’s no good waiting for [the internet] to become kind,” she says. “Create your own closed spaces. We do workshops and conversations exclusively for people who sign up to our newsletter. In real-life meetings you can go from hating something to hearing an eloquent presentation of another perspective and coming round to it, but you need the time and space to do that. This little amount of time gives you a move towards healing, even if it’s just licking some wounds that were opened on Twitter. But it could be much deeper, like being a survivor and feeling very conflicted about the film, which I do.”

Conflict is something that Searles, the film critic, knows about all too well in her work. “Since I started writing professionally, I almost feel like I’m known for writing about assault and rape at this point. I do write about it a lot, and as a survivor I continue to process it. I’ve been assaulted more than once so I have a lot to process, and so each time I’m writing about it I’m thinking about different aspects and remnants of those feelings. It can be very cathartic, but it’s a double-edged sword because sometimes I feel like I have an obligation to write about it too.”

There is also a constant act of self-preservation that comes with putting so much of yourself on the internet. “I often get messages from people thanking me for talking about these subjects with a deep understanding of what they mean,” Searles says. “I really appreciate that. I get negative messages about a lot of things, but not this one thing.”

Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

With such thoughtful approaches to heavy content, it feels like we’re a long way further down the road from blunt tools like content and trigger warnings. But do they still have their place? “It’s just never seemed appropriate to put trigger warnings on any of our reviews or features,” White explains. “We have a heavy male readership, still 70 percent male to 30 percent female. I’m conscious we’re talking to a lot of men who will often have experienced violence themselves, but we don’t put any warnings, because we are an adult magazine, and when we talk about violence in, say, an action film, or violence that is very heavily between men, we don’t caveat that at all.”

Bays, too, is sceptical of trigger warnings, explaining that “there’s not much evidence [they] actually work. A lot of psychologists expound on the fact that if people get stuck in their trauma, you can never really recover from PTSD if you don’t at some point face your trauma.” She adds: “I’m a survivor, and I found I May Destroy You deeply, profoundly triggering, but also cathartic. I think it’s more about how you talk about the work, rather than having a ‘NB: survivors of sexual abuse or assault shouldn’t see this’.”

“It’s important to give people a feel of what they’re in for,” argues Searles. “A lot of people who have dealt with suicide ideation would prefer that warning.” While some worry that a content warning is effectively a plot spoiler, Searles disagrees. “I don’t consider a content warning a spoiler. I just couldn’t imagine sitting down for a film, knowing there’s going to be a suicide, and letting it distract me from the film.” Still, she acknowledges the nuance. “I think using ‘self-harm’ might be better than just saying ‘suicide’.”

Mayhew shared insights on who actually decides which films on which platforms are preceded with warnings—turns out, it’s a bit messy. “The onus traditionally has fallen on governmental censorship when it comes to theatrical releases,” she explains. “But streamers can do what they want, they are not bound by those rules so they have to—as the distributors and broadcasters—take the government’s censors on board in terms of how they are going to navigate it.

“The consumer doesn’t know the difference,” she continues, “nor should they—so it means they can be watching The Crown on Netflix and get this trigger warning about bulimia, and go to the cinema the next day and not get it, and feel angry about it. So there’s the question of where is the responsibility of the distributor, and where is the responsibility of the audience member to actually find out for themselves.”

The warnings given to an audience member can also vary widely depending where they find themselves in the world, too. Promising Young Woman, for example, is rated M in Australia, R18 in New Zealand, and R in the United States. Meanwhile, the invaluable Common Sense Media recommends an age of fifteen years and upwards for the “dark, powerful, mature revenge comedy”. Mayhew says a publicist’s job is “to have your finger on the pulse” about these cultural differences. “You have to read the overall room, and when I say room I mean the culture as a whole, and you have to be constantly abreast of things across those different ages too.”

She adds: “This feeds into the importance of representation right at the top of those boardrooms and right down to the film sets. My job is to see all opinions, and I never will, especially because I am a white woman. I consider myself part of the LGBT community and sometimes I’ll bring that to a room that I think has been lacking in that area, when it comes to harmful stereotypes that can be propagated within films about LGBT people. But I can’t bring a Black person’s perspective, I cannot bring an Indigenous perspective. The more representation you have, the better your film is going to be, your campaign is going to be.”

Bays, who is also a filmmaker, agrees: representation is about information, and working with enough knowledge to make sure your film is being as faithful to your chosen communities as possible. “As a filmmaker, I’d feel ill-informed and misplaced if I was stumbling into an area of representation that I knew nothing about without finding some tools and collaborators who could bring deeper insight.”

Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in ‘Promising Young Woman’.

This is something Ford aimed for with Test Pattern’s choice of crew members, which had an effect not just on the end product, but on the entire production process. “I made sure that at the department head level, I was hiring people I was in community with and fully saw me as a person, and me them,” they say. “In some ways it made the experience more pleasurable.” That said, the shoot was still not without its incidents: “These were the types of things that in my experience often occur on a film set dominated by straight white men, that we're so accustomed to we sometimes don’t even notice it. I won’t go into it but what I will say is that it was not tolerated.”

Vital to the telling of the story were the lived experiences that Ford and their crew brought to set. “As it applies to the sensitive nature of this story, there were quite a few of us who have had our own experiences along the spectrum of assault, which means that we had to navigate our own internal re-processing of those experiences, which is hard to do when we’re constructing an experience of rape for a character.

“However, I think being able to share our own triggers and discomfort and context, when it came to Renesha’s experience, made the execution of it all the better. Again, it was a pleasure to be in community with such smart, talented and considerate women who each brought their own nuance to this film.”

* * *

Thinking about everything we’ve lived through by this point in 2021, and the heightened sensitivity and lowered mental health of film lovers worldwide, movies are carrying a pretty heavy burden right now: to, as Jane Fonda said at the Golden Globes, help us see through others’ eyes; also, to entertain or, at the very least, not upset us too much.

But to whom does film have a responsibility, really? Promising Young Woman’s writer-director Emerald Fennell, in an excellent interview with Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, said that she was thinking of audiences when she crafted the upsetting conclusion.

What she was thinking was: a ‘happy’ ending for Cassie gets us no further forward as a society. Instead, Cassie’s shocking end “makes you feel a certain way, and it makes you want to talk about it. It makes you want to examine the film and the society that we live in. With a cathartic Hollywood ending, that’s not so much of a conversation, really. It’s a kind of empty catharsis.”

So let’s flip the question: what is our responsibility, as women and allies, towards celebrating audacious films about tricky subjects? The marvellous, avenging blockbusters that once sucked all the air out of film conversation are on pause, for now. Consider the space that this opens up for a different kind of approach to “must-see movies”. Spread the word about Test Pattern. Shout from the rooftops about It’s A Sin. Add Body of Water and Herself and Violation to your watchlists. And, make sure the right people are watching.

Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill in ‘Test Pattern’.

I asked my interviewees: if they could choose one type of person they think should see Promising Young Woman, who would it be? Ford has not seen Fennell’s film, but “it feels good to have my film contribute to a larger discourse that is ever shifting, ever adding nuance”. They are very clear on who can learn the most from their own movie.

“A white man is featured so prominently in Test Pattern as a statement about how white people and men have a habit of centering themselves in the stories of others, prioritizing their experience and neglecting to recognize those on the margins. If Evan is triggering, he should be. If your feelings about Evan vacillate, it is by design.

“‘Allies’ across the spectrum are in a complicated dance around doing the ‘right thing’ and ‘showing up’ for those they are ostensibly seeking to support,” Ford continues. “Their constant battle is to remember that they need to be centering the needs of those they were never conditioned to center. Tricky stuff. Mistakes will be made. Mistakes must be owned. Sometimes reconciliation is required.”

It is telling that similar thoughts emerged from my other interviewees regarding Promising Young Woman’s ideal audience, despite the fact that none of them was in conversation with the others for this story. For that reason, as we come to the end of this small contribution to a very large, ongoing conversation, I’ve left their words intact.

White: I think it’s a great film for men.

Searles: I feel like the movie is very much pointed at cisgender heterosexual men.

Mayhew: Men.

White: We’re always warned about the alpha male with a massive ego, but we’re not warned about the beta male who reads great books, listens to great records, has great film recommendations. But he probably slyly undermines you in a completely different way. Anybody can be a predator.

Searles: The actors chosen to play these misogynist, rape culture-perpetuating men are actors we think of as nice guys.

White: We are so much more tolerant of a man knocking the woman over the head, dragging her down an alley and raping her, because we understand that. But rape culture is made up of millions of small things that enable the people who do it. We are more likely to be attacked in our own homes by men we love than a stranger in the street.

Mayhew: The onus should not fall on women to call this out.

Searles: It’s not just creeps, like the ones you see usually in these movies. It’s guys like you. What are you going to do to make sure you’re not like this?

Related content

Sex Monsters, Rape Revenge and Trauma: a work-in-progress list

Rape and Revenge: a list of films that fall into, and play with, the genre

Unconsenting Media: a search engine for sexual violence in broadcasting

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

If you need help or to talk to someone about concerns raised for you in this story, please first know that you are not alone. These are just a few of the many organizations and resources available, and their websites include more information.

US: RAINN (hotline 0800 656 HOPE); LGBT National Help Center; Pathways to Safety; Time’s Up.

Canada: Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centers—contacts by province and territory

UK/Ireland: Mind; The Survivors Trust (hotline 08088 010818); Rape Crisis England and Wales

Europe: Rape Crisis Network Europe

[thatcharmingjerk]

Top 5 fictional animal characters :3c

Oh this was HARD!!!! And even I obsessed over this for few hours I still feel like I’m forgetting someone actually important but !!!!! Let’s try!!!!!!!

Ok first one is character that I do not like at all, I dont think I even sympathize with him but I think he’s fantastically written and I feel like I understand the point and motives of this bitch but I know some of yall will cringe at me for picking him but still! my first pick is:

-Walter White. I think he’s just so good depiction of how dangerous it can be when you have unresolved issues and you’re in a tight spot, like the cunt started as good ™ man who worked hard and did his best to provide for his family, but the cancer and the bitterness most people seem to overlook made him to spiral into such monster..! 

I just seriously think that he’s so good example what might happen when someone who has mental baggage and toxic and unprocessed bitterness is pushed too far 

......Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I only now noticed the animal part of the ask asdfghjhkg anyway my other picks for top 5 characters would’ve been Edward Elric, Dean Winchester, Ragnar Lodbrok and Nuuskamuikkunen (aka Snufkin) who I also thought to write little essays of!!! 

But!!!!!!!! Animals!!!!!! Ok ok ok lets seeeeeeee 

(I had to get my thoughts out of my system so dude rambling is under cut too!!) 

1. Moro from Mononoke Hime, the wolf mother, I just love her she’s fierce and dangerous but also nurturing and kind enough to raise a human among her pups, I think Moro is just one of the good wolves in media, like good as in pretty correct, not a pet but also not a mindless killing machine either!! 

2. Black Beauty, the main character from the movie with same name, idk he just is so horse, he just keeps being kind and nice and working even after all the shit he has to put up with because he trusts that some people are good too. Yes that movie makes me cry, yes I’m emotional of horses!!!!! 

3. Scar from Lion King, he’s queer coded!!! He’s got this greasy style!!! His moral compass is set on whatever!!! He just lies and cheats and don’t give a shit of anyone! Gotta love a good villain! 

4. Akame from Hopeanuoli/Ginga, idk he’s got style, plus also gotta love a bitch who decides just not to give a shit of old tradition he notices are just empty, like ‘’hey I just now noticed there’s actual problems in world and us guarding some old scrolls ain’t one, bye boys i’mma burn this place!’’ 

Ok last one shall beeeee...! 

5. Balto!!! As a weirdo myself the whole conflict of not feeling like belonging with either dogs nor wolves, might I say, mood. 

Really tho I think Balto is one of the rare cases where main character dude being an underdog (hehe) don’t come with the scott pilgrim -syndrome so thats neat, 

and I just really liked and i still like to see an outsider find self worth in their true self and, AND!! becoming cherished part of community!!! 

So there we go!! Did I overthink this? Absolutely!!! Did I ramble too much? Mayhaps!!! But yeah, here we goooo! And yes theres what I originally thought for this ask before properly reading it under the cut!!! XD 

Thank u for the ask anyhoo <3 

Yes!!!!! My semi-planned rambling of my boys went here before I could think if best animals!!! so yeah!!! walter is a cunt but the rest of these choices i actually do love so! 

Edward Elric, a bastard!!! I love that in any character!!! He’s just so well written too, like he’s the big brother, he has responsibilty, he knows he needs to do stuff no one else can, he’s smart but in believable way so it doesn’t feel too god-like etc, the trauma!!! the tenacity!!! and at the end of the day behind all of he’s just a teenage who lost almost everything and just..... *clenches fist* yeah......

Dean Winchester, yes another big brother but this dude is whole different story, yes he had to look after himself and his little brother but there was also terrifying father figure present to beat him up (mentally, possibly physically too?) for any mistake like its telling he gives Dean shit about car maintenance even when he’s over twenty so....... and yes big part of Dean character isn’t probably what writers intended but I don’t care, i just like what i see in him and his macho-mask and what else!!! 

Ragnar Lodbrok, yes also a historical figure but we’re talking about the dude from vikings show obviously!! I just LOVE how he’s a very manly man and etc blah blah but also soft..! He’s a family man!! he loves his wife!!! plays with his kids!!! he’s a leader sure but his real interest isn’t power or gold he just wants better life for his family and people!!! He loves good soil over gold!!!! but he’s also not a perfect ™, he has his weaknesses and his morals can be interesting to say at least, I just adore his vibe and the self confidence!!!!!

and then, Nuuskamuikkunen, he’s perfect being, this bitch has it all figured out, acab, fuck the stupid rules and just yes!!! if I didn’t love my trinkets and place for creating art so much I would absolutely live in a tent too, or at least with life that fits in single backpack!!!

[electricbluebutterflies]

22 for Garcy?

This has been in the drafts for... years, probably, but here we are, I still love these two and I am emotionally messy enough to be writing them again. Usual ignore-the-ending / post-everything ‘verse, PG-ish, also on ao3.

“It’s not heavy.  I’m stronger than I look.”

Technically speaking, Lucy has never had a domestic arrangement.

Sure, the years spent with the team have to count forsomething, but that was both involuntary and didn’t involve a consistent romanticelement until close to the end. Could’ve happened sooner, and she got to spendsix months trying to convince everyone else in her life that it wasn’t,but… even then, it was different. Doesn’t really count as living with a partnerif what you’re actually doing is hiding in their spaces and occasionallyaccepting affection.

But it’s over now, and they won, and now she gets to see ifthere are any actual skeletons in her mother’s house (there’s already speculationand possibly a betting pool in the group chat about what weird things she’sgoing to find), and she is not doing that alone.

There is a certain irony in this, in dragging home a partnerwho is almost everything she was probably taught to avoid but wasn’t perceptiveenough to be aware of. Flynn is older than her by just enough to matter even withher comfortably in her mid-thirties, has been through brutal hell and does notsee a point in pretending otherwise, only charming when he wants something, andthen there’s the whole physical structure of him to deal with. The man isdefinitely someone else’s nightmare come to life, and sometimes Lucy thinksthat might be part of the appeal, the romantic cliché of trying to tame thedangerous a little.

Not that she’s done any taming so much as made sure she’shis favorite person, but y’know. Details.

Point is, she needs to clean out the house and sell anythingof value before trying to get rid of the house itself – the curse of being theclosest surviving family member, and no she does not know how everything stayeduntouched for a year and a half but there are questions Lucy does not ask inthis life – and having the assistance of someone more physically capable thanshe is might be an asset for moving hundred-odd-year-old furniture. At least,that was how she phrased it when suggesting the idea last week when plans werebeing laid and it became apparent he had none. At the time, their hesitantromantic involvement wasn’t even worth mentioning as a reason he should go withher.

It’s not… it’s not like anything else she’s ever done, sheknows that. There have been really good kisses but not more than that becausethin walls and caution and uncertainty if her IUD has expired, and a warmprotectiveness to it, and she’s not sure where they go from there. She wasn’tsleeping alone once they came back here and he followed her upstairs withoutquestions, but they haven’t turned in new directions and if they end up justbeing rather tactile roommates she could live with that. She’s not going topush through that tangle of unresolved issues.

But right now, as she paces the formal dining room shethinks her mother may have used twice in her lifetime and her partnerleans against the wall and watches her, she wants more. And isn’t that alwayswhere it goes to hell. If there’s one thing Lucy has learned from the nearly-three-yeardetour her life took, it is that she should not want things because the momentshe realizes she does is the moment it goes horribly wrong. She should not wantthis other person, even with his near-feral sense of loyalty, to break her patterns.She should not want to keep him. It will end badly, she is sure.

“Would it make you feel better to break any of that?” Flynnasks, breaking silence and gesturing towards the decorative china cabinet.

“Worth too much,” Lucy shrugs. “Wouldn’t help anything.”

The problem with this whole cleanout project is there is noeasy place to start. Taking on the more public parts of the house first makessense because she’s less likely to find anything odd down here but thatdoesn’t mean she won’t, and that just builds a sense of dread as she works herway up the spiral. Today is the first day they’re even trying; the previousthree days have been an attempt at reacclimating to a quieter life, completewith a near-traumatic trip to a supermarket. Perhaps this self-isolation isn’ta great idea for their respective personalities, but…

“What about that statue? What is that?”

Lucy glances at said statue, and honestly hell if she knows.It looks vaguely Greek but probably isn’t, and she is reminded that she doesget her lack of consistent aesthetic sensibilities from that side of thefamily, and… screw it, might as well find out what it is. She takes a few stepsover and tries to lift the thing, and-

“Don’t… let me do that.”

Oh she should’ve known this would activate her partner’sinstincts. Damn him.

“It’s not heavy,” she points out. “I’m stronger than I look,and… I think this may have actually been intended as a lawn ornament.” And nota good quality one either, to the extent Lucy feels capable of judging suchthings. Suspiciously lightweight and might break if she dropped it, which shehas no plan to do but-

“Do we want to keep it?”

She sets the object down and looks at it as if she evencares. “Not really?”

“Is there anything in this room you do like?”

“No?” She feels scared to say that out loud, like she’s temptingghosts to come out of the walls. “I don’t… I don’t know what we even need. But allof this can go.”

“Alright.”

They’re both quiet for a few moments, standing there closebut not touching and uncertain. Being able to make so many choices in successionis honestly terrifying, Lucy is realizing, and she’s not sure she likesthe control. See, this is why she couldn’t do this project on her own, becausenothing would ever get done. Even with help she’s not sure they’ll getanywhere, but-

“There are boxes out in the front hallway, if you could getthose for me?”

And then she is alone, and she can’t remember the last timethat happened. Even if only for a minute, it feels wrong. She’s gottentoo used to living on top of other people, the chaos of it all, becoming somekind of family because that was the only way forward. Now she could go dayswithout seeing another human being, if she wanted. She gets to choose that too,and she’s not sure-

A hand on her shoulder brings her out of her spiral, tetheringher as always. She isn’t alone, not in any way that counts. The two damagedones clinging together like they did on the bad nights when she was in theworst of her unraveling and he was quiet and kind like she should’ve seenbefore she made her mistakes and-

“We don’t have to do this all at once,” he murmurs. “Or atany speed.”

“I have nothing else,” she counters. “And you’re…”

“Here with you,” he says before she can come up with somemore bitey phrase. “As long as you’ll let me be.”

She breaks.

See, the thing is, Lucy had always expected to do thisproject alone. When she’d been younger and oblivious to the amount of evilweirdness her bloodline was tangled up in, she’d assumed the timing would be alittle different, but she knew the score. She was the good responsible daughter,the one who would get the short straw when something happened. And as she’d gottenolder, and made consistently questionable romantic choices none of which lookedlike a future…

The reality of the situation as it has actually happened,the fact that she does have someone on her side, is too much to acceptright now.

She lets herself be held because words are not going tohappen right now, lets him pet her hair and be a comfort because she is notsure what else to do. How does one tell a partner, a potential-but-not-quitelover, that there was never any plan for this part? That she, prone toover-planning as an anxiety workaround, never thought she’d bring anyone hometo deal with this particular curse of eldest daughters? She’s not sure she can.She’s not sure she can avoid it either.

“I’ll deal with it,” he says after a while. “If that’seasier. Take everything to that antique dealer you were mentioning and-“

“I can’t ask that of you.”

“You’re not asking. I’m volunteering.”

Lucy takes a moment to envision how that would go down, Flynn’shistorically unpredictable people skills meeting the nightmarish world ofpretentious assholes who try to under-pay for antique furniture. It sounds likea disaster waiting to happen at best.

“I’ll let you maneuver everything into the truck,” shecounters. “But I’m doing the talking when we get there.”

“They’ll try to take advantage of you.”

“I’m not leaving you outside like a dog I’m just… notletting you threaten anyone you don’t have to.”

He hums low against her body, contemplating. “I can livewith that.”

“Good because I’m not giving you a choice here.”

He brushes his lips against her forehead, and for a momentshe can believe they’ll get through this intact. “Whatever you want.”

[katikacreations]

(Cover illustration by @clowncauldron​ ) LINK TO AO3 VERSION IN THE NOTES! Formatting is better on AO3, it’s easier to read over there!

SUMMARY:  Gyro can’t fix Boyd’s glitching problem, so he asks Dr. Von Drake for advice. Boyd goes to a pool party and confesses to Huey that his new home life with Gyro isn’t exactly perfect. 

2BO, you are not evil! You are good! You’re more than your programming! You are a definitely real boy! Gyro’s own words echoed in his head as he tried to sleep on the flight back to Duckburg.

It was a gruelling twelve hours on a cargo plane like the Sunchaser, but if one was willing to put up with the discomfort and inconvenience of being stashed between boxes of freight, it was worth it. Mr. McDuck didn’t charge for employees to hitch a ride on cargo planes that were already scheduled, and there was no TSA screening for private cargo flights, leaving from private airfields, which was a big help when you were traveling with hyper-advanced combat technology like the Gizmosuit and 2BO.

2BO. Boyd. Whatever you called it, the android was potentially very dangerous. It had been able to override Dr. Akita’s programming and choose its own actions, which had saved both Gyro and Fenton’s lives, but how? Asking an AI to ignore its programming was like asking a human being to ignore their instincts, like trying to inhale underwater, or sticking your hands into a fire. It could be done, but it was difficult and sometimes impossible.

Whatever Dr. Akita had programmed into 2BO had become lower priority and less important than the android’s own, self-created programming, even if Akita’s programming was older. That’s the only way that 2BO could have possibly overridden the commands.

It had to be the result of twenty years of independence. 2BO had gone so long without anyone to give it orders, it must have learned to make choices for itself, otherwise it would never have survived as long as it did. It was a learning system, so the ability to re-evaluate and change its own programming over time to adapt to new situations was integral.

But was 2BO a real boy? Gyro had said the words, but he knew of course that they weren’t true. 2BO was a machine that emulated a real boy very convincingly, but that did not make it a human being. Gyro felt a twinge of guilt for speaking such nonsense out loud in front of God and everybody, but he’d had no other choice. 2BO hadn’t responded to anything else, and that phrase had clearly been lodged deep in its memory as something significant, even if it was just nonsense spoken by an immature and naive younger version of himself. Gyro had tried everything else he could think of before resorting to that meaningless platitude.

It had worked, though. Gyro and Fenton were both still alive. 2BO was with them, had circumvented Dr. Akita’s override programming. They were all headed back to Duckburg, safe and sound.

2BO wasn’t a real boy. What 2BO was, Gyro wasn’t sure yet.

Gyro Gearloose was a proud man, and he’d earned the right to that through a life of hard work. He knew he was smart and wasn’t about to partake of the sin of false modesty. He was justifiably proud of his superior intellect, his ability to keep discovering new truths of the universe, and to keep designing and creating new and imaginative technology over the years.

He’d started inventing when he’d been just barely old enough to pick up a screwdriver, and he hadn’t stopped in the forty-three years since. He did the work because he loved it, because it was the most fulfilling thing in the world for him, because nothing else compared to the satisfaction that came with seeing an idea from his head come together in his hands and finally become a fully-formed creation that existed in the real world.

Other people took weekends and nights off because they worked to live, but Gyro lived to work. The little moments of life - visiting family, spending time with friends, “relaxing” and “resting” - were obstacles between him and getting back to the work he loved with his whole heart. They were distractions, necessary evils he was occasionally forced to bow to, but they would never be the thing which drove him. Gyro lived to discover, imagine, build and create. So anything that got in the way of that was quickly pushed to the side.

This presented a problem. Being a very proud man, Gyro was not particularly practiced at asking for help. It took him a long time to realize when he needed help, and even longer to figure out how to ask for it.

2BO had started living with Gyro after their return from Tokyolk, and Gyro suddenly found himself thrust into the position of not only trying to fix the android’s damaged programming (an ongoing, unresolved issue), but also having to provide daily guidance for something that acted very much like a child.

He was being forced by circumstance to act as a caretaker and to parent. Needless to say, that was not a skill set Gyro had honed, and it wasn’t a job he wanted to do. He had no aspirations of being a father or having children, but 2BO constantly pushed him into that role with each new interaction.

It wasn’t all bad of course: 2BO was pleasant enough to be around, so it took some time before things reached critical mass. 2BO could take care of itself, was self-reliant for the most part, and was often helpful around the lab with its superior strength, lightning-fast processing speed, and its ability to withstand deadly radiation.

But 2BO wanted continual attention from Gyro, and he didn’t have the patience for it. 2BO constantly wanted to play games, and every night it asked Gyro to read it a “bedtime story”, even though 2BO didn’t actually sleep.

Generally Gyro just dismissed the requests, and told the android to go play with the McDuck children, or Lil’ Bulb. He’d tried to read to 2BO once or twice, but the android had complained when Gyro started reading articles from scientific journals out loud, so they didn’t do that anymore.

All of that was bad enough, but it was the incessant questions that finally pushed Gyro too far.

“Why did swear words get invented if we’re not allowed to say them?”

“How did people make the first tools if they didn’t have any tools?”

“”Huey, Duey and Louie are triplets. Did they all come out of one egg or were they in three separate eggs?”

“How did Ms. Della lay three eggs that big?”

"Where do thoughts come from?"

“Are there infinite words?”

“No, 2BO, but there are infinite numbers.”

“Well if there is a word for every number, then there must be infinite words.”

“How do I know that I’m real?”

“What happens to a person when they die?”

“What did it feel like on your last day of being a child?”

“Why do people hold hands?”

“Well, adults hold children by the hand to make sure they don’t fall down or run into traffic.”

“Then why do adults sometimes hold hands?”

“I don’t know,” said Gyro, who had never actually held hands with anyone after his eleventh birthday. He’d never experienced the urge, either. Why did adults hold hands? “Maybe to restrain the person they’re with, to keep them from leaving.”

Gyro Gearloose needed help.

From a technical, legal point of view, 2BO was not his responsibility. He’d only been an assistant on the project, which had begun years before Gyro had even set foot in Japan. The reason he’d taken the fall for the destruction of Tokyolk was because they had needed someone to blame for the catastrophe, and he’d been the only available target after Dr. Akita disappeared. None of it was Gyro’s fault, but he’d suffered for it regardless.

He’d done jail time, lost his scholarship to the Tokyolk Institute of Technology, and had to start his doctorate over from scratch at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville years later when the disaster with 2BO was no longer so fresh in everyone’s minds. Gyro had paid for what happened in Tokyolk many times over, and he was only just starting to dig himself out of that hole.

Despite all that, morally he felt an obligation to 2BO. He had been there when the android first activated. He’d spent months programming, teaching, and training it to act as much like a person as possible. The fact that it was struggling with all of that now was Gyro’s fault. He’d been a naive, sentimental idiot in his youth and instead of letting 2BO be the weapon Dr. Akita had designed it to be, he’d forced it into an eternal game of playing pretend, and now 2BO was barely functional as a result.

He could think of few worse fates for an artificial intelligence. To be shackled and bound to arbitrary human standards of behavior, to waste all of it’s mental powers on trying to convincingly present itself as a human child when in reality, it was so much more. Gyro felt sorry for it.

Gyro Gearloose needed help. He needed a specialist.

He offloaded the onerous task of seeking assistance to Fenton.

“I need you to find a specialist to help with 2BO’s glitching problem,” he told him one night, as Fenton was on his way home.

“What?” Fenton called back, his foot holding the elevator door open as he leaned back into the airlock that connected the elevators to the lab floor to hear Gyro better.

“Find a specialist to help with 2BO’s glitching!” Gyro shouted back.

“A specialist to help with Boyd’s glitches?” Fenton called back. The elevator attempted to close on Fenton, and he put his arm up to make it stop. The door pushed against his hand briefly before sliding away from the resistance. “What kind of specialist?”

The elevator began to make a high-pitched squealing sound, protesting the fact that it was being held open.

“I don’t know!” Gyro shouted back. “A programmer, I guess! Someone who knows Fortran 77, C++, MATLAB, Python, and can handle system architecture of at least 100 billion bits.”

“Not asking for much, are you?” Fenton replied with a level of sarcasm Gyro knew his assistant wouldn’t dare to voice if he was in the same room as him.

“Just let me know when you find someone!”

It was nearly a week later when the topic came up again. Gyro was attempting to troubleshoot a glitch in 2BO that was triggered every time the android heard the word pineapple. At this point the list of things that could trigger a glitch was truly overwhelming. A few days ago 2BO had nearly destroyed someone’s house because he heard a dog barking. Thankfully, the McDuck family had covered it up, blaming a minor earthquake for the damage.

The android sat on a table beside the lab’s Cray XT3 computer terminal. 2BO was powered down, eyes closed and body slumped forward, cables connecting it to the Cray’s data ports. The monitor was awash with seemingly endless lines of code from the core dump they’d just done, and Gyro was pain-stakingly working his way through them, searching for the source of the problem.

“Dr. Gearloose! I’ve gotten some replies from the people I contacted about helping with Boyd,” Fenton said, approaching with a stack of envelopes in hand.

Gyro glanced away from his work only long enough to see the paper envelopes. “You wrote physical letters? No wonder it took them so long to respond.”

“In this day and age, a personal touch like a paper letter can really help make a good impression,” Fenton said. “Also, people familiar with the programming languages you asked for all skew older.”

Gyro made a noise that indicated he’d lost interest in the conversation and that Fenton should move on. The man had gotten better at reading him, and, instead of making further small talk, he went to start opening the pile of letters.

“Alright, let’s see,” Fenton said, and Gyro marked where he was in the code so he could come back to it later, deciding to take a break. He wouldn’t be able to concentrate properly with Fenton talking and rustling around nearby. He took the opportunity to take off his glasses and massage around his closed eyes.

“Yes? Get on with it, Inter--Assistant.”

“Eh, espere,” Fenton said, and Gyro heard the rapid fluttering of papers as Fenton fumbled with them. “I… This doesn’t make sense. They all say… ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘Hell no’, ‘Contact me again and I’ll get a restraining order?!’ ”

“What did you write to them, Assistant?” Gyro demanded, though he already had a hunch of what might have gone wrong.

“I--What did I do? Nada! Nothing unusual! I just said that you were looking for someone with the skills you listed, to consult with on a technical problem you were having.”

“Did you put my name on them?” Gyro asked, wanting to confirm his suspicions.

“Of course I did!” Fenton said. “It’s your lab! Who would I tell them was writing, the Queen of England? Lin-Manuel Miranda? Spider-Ham?! I used the lab stationary that has Dr. Von Drake crossed out and your name written in the margins.”

“You idiot,” Gyro said, but he was more tired than angry. “Did you forget that I’m a pariah in the scientific community? People still blame me for what happened in Japan with 2BO twenty years ago, and if they’d started to forget, last month’s incident made it the hot new gossip all over again. I thought you were smart enough to figure that out and put your own name instead. I didn’t realize I had to tell you everything.”

Fenton’s face tightened the more Gyro spoke, taking the scolding without any further attempt at making excuses, which was a relief. Gyro hated when people couldn’t keep it together.

“Considering your usual tendency to overdo things, should I assume that you’ve written to every programmer in the United States that fits my requirements, and all those bridges have now been thoroughly burnt?” Gyro asked with some venom.

“Also a few in México and Canada,” Fenton said, shrinking in on himself with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gearloose, I didn’t mean to cause trouble for--”

“Go… Do something else. Away from me,” Gyro said, struggling not to shout at the other man. “We’ll have to continue working on 2BO without assistance.”

Huey loved planning things. Oftentimes he found himself making plans for events that would never even happen. The process of planning and figuring out all the details just felt good, even if he never got outside of the planning stage. He could spend hours daydreaming about parties, expeditions, and camping trips.

Planning was his favorite part of any adventure, and he loved going over maps and charts with Uncle Scrooge, observing how the old man did it and trying to learn something from it.

So planning for their first ever pool party with their extended group of friends was beyond exciting. It wasn’t just a fantasy scenario that had no hope of happening. Their friends were really all coming over for a day of fun in the pool, and Mrs. Beakley had even given Huey a budget for buying snacks and party supplies.

He’d scoured the Pinfeather app looking for ideas all week, spent days creating pool-themed decorations, and all of yesterday preparing dishes so there would be a variety of healthy and fun food available, no matter what kind of dietary restrictions their friends might have. He’d thought of everything and was extremely proud of how it had all come together. Nothing could possibly go wrong when he’d done such a thorough job of planning things.

Everything was going completely wrong!

The party had been in full swing for a couple of hours, and Huey couldn’t bring himself to go into the water or join in with the others. Nobody was eating his lovingly crafted healthy snacks. His brothers had taken one look at Huey’s Fun Summer Dessert Pizza, his Gluten-free tortilla chips and strawberry corn salsa, his hotdog sliders with mango and pineapple chutney, and they had started raiding the pantry, helping their guests to microwaved hot wings, cheese-wiz, mini pizza bagels, potato chips, and Pep soda.

Lena, Violet and Webby (who wasn’t technically a guest but Huey had counted her as one for the sake of his logistics) seemed to be having plenty of fun on their own without the piles of pre-made water balloons that were stacked on a pool float bobbing around in the water, or the board games Huey had arranged by the neat stacks of towels and sunscreen. Lena had turned off Huey’s Summer Pool Party Fun Mix five minutes after her arrival and plugged in her own phone to play the newest Featherweights album. Violet had complimented him on the decorative wreath made of novelty cocktail umbrellas and swords at the front door, but Huey wasn’t sure if she had been employing sarcasm or not.

Louie climbed out of the pool and shook the water off his feathers. Huey felt too miserable to even bother flinching away. What did it matter? He was in swim trunks anyway.

“How come you’re just sitting over here by yourself?” Louie asked, picking up a bag of chips and shoving a handful into his mouth as he sat down next to Huey.

“No reason,” Huey mumbled. He was saved from further conversation when an app on his phone told him there was someone at the front door. “Someone’s at the door, it’s gotta be Boyd! I’ll go let him in.”

“Robo-Boyd?” Louie called after him, tone incredulous. “Why’d you invite him? Can he even go in the water?”

“Boyd! The party started hours ago, is everything okay?” Huey asked as he flung open the front door. Boyd stood there wearing a Hawaiian shirt with anchors and ships on it, red swim trunks, and his red anti-laser sunglasses. He was carrying a large plastic tupperware container.

“I’m sorry for arriving late.” Boyd said, holding the tupperware out for Huey to take. “Yes, everything’s fine now. I brought this for the party, I hope everyone likes it.”

Huey vaguely remembered reading something about it being polite in Japan to bring a gift with you when visiting someone’s home. He took the plastic container and tried to guess what might be inside it by the weight and the black and white color he could discern through the semi-opaque cover.

“Oh, thanks for bringing something!” Huey said. “What is it?”

“A cookies and cream sheet cake.”

Everyone was going to love that, Huey thought with a mix of envy and embarrassment. Why was Boyd better at understanding regular people than he was? Shouldn’t Boyd be at a disadvantage, since he was a literal computer and Huey was a flesh and blood kid?

“Awesome. Come on, let’s go out back so I can introduce you to everybody,” Huey said.

“I’m excited to meet Webby’s friends, Lena and Violet,” Boyd said, closing the door behind them as they walked through the house.

“Why’d you show up so late? That’s not like you.” Even though Boyd said everything was fine, Huey couldn’t stop himself from worrying. Both he and Boyd were usually very punctual.

“I was helping Mr. Gizmoduck clean up a shipping tanker accident in Audubon Bay. I wanted to send you a text, but the signal was bad. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

“It’s okay! I’m just glad it wasn’t anything too dangerous and that you’re safe,” Huey answered in a rush, not wanting Boyd to feel guilty for trying to be a hero. He knew that ever since they’d returned from Tokyolk, the android boy had spent a lot of his time helping people all around Duckburg and St. Canard.

“I think it’s really cool that you’ve been helping out Gizmoduck,” Huey said, and Boyd flashed him a huge, brilliant smile that made Huey’s chest feel funny. He smiled back at Boyd.

“Hi, I’m Boyd, a definitely real boy!” Boyd announced, offering his hand to Violet, who shook it, and Lena, who didn’t.

“I’m Violet. You’re in the same Junior Woodchuck troop as Huey, right?”

“Affirmative! I’m a member of Junior Woodchuck troop 15. You recently became a Senior Junior Woodchuck. You have more badges than 86.2% of the other members in our age range. I think that’s very admirable.”

“Cool,” Said Lena indifferently. “So you’re Huey’s friend? Where are you from?”

“I was born in Tokyolk. Where are you from, Lena?”

“Uh, let’s not talk about that,” Lena replied uneasily.

“Why not? I answered your question,” Boyd said.

“Lena’s kind of been through a lot recently,” Huey said, interrupting the conversation before it could get any more confrontational. “Talking about family stuff is hard for her.”

“Oh,” Boyd said. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know.”

“It’s whatever,” Lena said with a shrug, radiating a cool indifference that Huey envied a little.

“Boyd’s an android,” Huey explained, “But he’s also just a kid like any of us.” This revelation seemed to soften Lena’s attitude.

“This is my first time attending a pool party. I’ve also been to a birthday party. Those are all the parties I have been to,” Boyd said.

“You know what? This is our first pool party, too,” Lena said, smiling at Boyd. “And I’m having a great time. Do you eat food?”

“Yeah, I love eating food!” Boyd said, as the group made their way over to the snack table. “I need to consume nutrients and calories to maintain my biological components.”

“Me too,” Lena said.

“You planned this whole party, right Huey?” Violet asked. “I think the streamers between the umbrellas and the colorful leis really create a festive atmosphere.”

“Thanks, I made them by hand,” Huey said, grateful that someone appreciated just how much effort it had taken to prepare everything.

“And I’m guessing Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum weren’t a lot of help,” Lena added, unwrapping a chocolate ding-dong and taking a bite.

“Which one of us is Tweedle-Dee and which of us is Tweedle-Dum?” Dewey called from the pool. Lena ignored them and looked at Huey expectantly, waiting for an answer.

Huey laughed a little, and he hugged his arms to himself to try and ease how awkward he felt with the older girl’s attention on him.

“Yeah, they weren’t really interested. Planning stuff is more my thing.”

“Well, you’re good at it,” Lena said bluntly, “They’re probably too lazy to try and compete with someone who tries as hard as you do.”

“Who are you calling lazy?” Louie called from the pool float he was lounging on.

“You!” Lena shouted back.

“Fair, that’s an accurate assessment, carry on,” Louie replied as he floated away.

Maybe the party wasn’t going that bad. Now that Boyd had arrived, Huey felt a lot more confident, and watching Boyd enjoying himself made Huey happy.

“I have an easier time breaking down and extracting nutrients from simple, unprocessed foods,” Boyd said, as he polished off a second plate of cheese-and-fruit skewers. “I don’t have a sense of taste, but I��m sure these are really yummy. My compositional sensors say the fruit is at peak ripeness and that the cheese is at an ideal temperature.”

“Glad you like them,” Huey said.

“You’re welcome. Should we go in the pool?” Boyd said.

“Can you go in the pool?” Huey asked. “Aren’t you too heavy?”

“Dr. Gearloose installed automatic arm floaties on me this morning.” There was a loud hissing sound as metal panels on Boyd’s upper arms retracted and PVC material inflated with air, outfitting Boyd with swim fins. “They’re rated up to 145 kg which is twice my weight. He assured me that with these, I would be able to remain safely buoyant while in the water.”

“If Uncle Donald could install those on us, he would,” Huey said.

“So where did you get the cookies and cream cake from? Dr. Gearloose didn’t make it, did he?” Huey asked. The sun had started to set, and the pool lights were on. The other kids were all playing with glow-sticks and glow-in-the-dark bracelets and necklaces Huey had bought in bulk online. A little distance away, Mom and Uncle Donald were barbequing some burgers and hot dogs for dinner.

Boyd hadn’t taken any of the glow-in-the-dark stuff, but he seemed happy to sit on the edge of the pool next to Huey, their feet dangling in the water. Boyd’s eyes were lit from within, like flashlights, as the daylight around them grew dimmer. His tinted sunglasses turned the light red, and it reminded Huey of the taillights of a car.

“No, of course Dr. Gearloose didn’t make the cake, he’s much too busy for that kind of frivolity. I went to the employee cafeteria at The Bin to buy some slices of cake, and one of the ladies who works there asked why I was buying eight pieces. I explained to her that I was going to a party, and she asked why I was by myself in the cafeteria at 9AM, and I told her I didn’t have--”

“Uh, I think I get the general gist of what happened,” Huey said. “So she made the cake for you?”

“Yes! She said that she was certain it would be popular, and I think her assessment was correct. Its sugar content is similar to snacks that children in our age range typically enjoy.”

Even though it was getting dark outside, the air was still almost unbearably hot. It had been over ninety degrees every day for the past two weeks in Duckburg, and the heat lingered. Cicadas buzzed in the dark, and occasionally a frog croaked.

“Kids, time for dinner!” Donald called. Gradually they all set aside their games, dried off with towels, and made their way to the picnic table that had been set out for dinner in the garden. Boyd grabbed Huey’s arm before he could follow, stopping him.

“What’s wrong?” Huey asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Boyd said. “I just… Wanted to thank you for inviting me to your pool party. It’s been a lot of fun.”

“Well, don’t worry, the fun’s not done yet,” Huey said. Maybe Boyd was just sad that the party was almost over? “We’re still going to tell scary stories around a campfire, and Uncle Scrooge and Mom always have some great ones.”

“That sounds great. I’m excited to hear the stories,” Boyd said, his grip on Huey’s arm relaxing until the android’s hand slipped down and rested against Huey’s. They were holding hands. Huey felt that same funny feeling in his chest from before, and suddenly the rest of the world around them was weirdly quiet. No frogs, no cicadas, no Uncle Donald arguing with Mom. Just him and Boyd, holding hands on a summer night.

“...But something’s bothering you, isn’t it?” Huey asked.

Boyd didn’t answer immediately, which was unusual for the android. Huey squeezed his hand gently, trying to encourage the other boy to share his feelings.

“When I lived with Mr. Beaks, he played with me all the time for the first few days, but then he started ignoring me. When I lived with the Drakes, I could play with Doofus any time I wanted, but he didn’t want to play with me, and said things that made me feel bad. Mr. and Mrs. Drake were nice, but if they paid too much attention to me, Doofus always got mad…”

“I like living with Dr. Gearloose better than any of the others,” Boyd said. “But sometimes I feel lonely. He doesn’t have a lot of time to play with me either, and if I distract Mr. Fenton or Mr. Manny from work too much, Dr. Gearloose yells at them. At night when he goes to sleep, he makes me stay in the closet, so I won’t wake him up by moving around, and he doesn’t like reading me bedtime stories.

“Is something wrong with me?” Boyd asked. “It feels like every time I join a family, they end up getting bored with me, or they don’t really want me around.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you!” Huey said. “A lot of kids feel that way. Sometimes parents or other kids don’t have time to play with us, sometimes they don’t want to play with us, and it does feel lonely. Also, not everyone has a good family. Sometimes people just don’t get along.”

“What do regular kids do if they’re in a bad family?” Boyd asked.

“Honestly? I think they’re just stuck when that happens. Running away and living on your own is dangerous and hard. But you don’t have that problem! Since you’re a super-strong robot, if you want to leave, you can just go.”

“Sort of,” Boyd said. “It’s… Not that simple. I’m a robot, but I’m bio-mechanical. I still need to eat and charge some of my power cells occasionally. Getting food and access to electricity when I’m on my own can be hard. But the worst part is… I really don’t like being alone. I like to be around people.”

There was such a sadness in Boyd’s voice in that moment that Huey felt a need to do more than just hold hands. “Would it be okay if I hugged you?” he asked, not knowing what to say or how else to make Boyd feel better.

“Yes,” Boyd said, looking delighted by the offer. He held his arms out stiffly towards Huey, and it looked so silly that Huey struggled not to laugh.

“Okay.” Huey carefully put his arms around Boyd, hugging him tight.

“BOYS!” Della shouted from a distance, making Huey nearly jump out of his skin. “Come eat before the food gets cold! C’mon! You got water in your ears or what?”

“Coming, Mom!” Huey shouted back, grabbing Boyd by the hand and pulling him towards where the rest of their family and friends were gathered.

Once a month, Gyro had a video chat with Dr. Ludwig Von Drake. The man had mentored him when he made his second attempt at his doctorate, and though he wasn’t always easy to have a long-distance conversation with, Gyro found the exercise useful in a variety of ways. Sometimes he could bounce ideas off the older scientist and find better solutions he might not have thought of on his own. Sometimes they talked about world events and science news. Sometimes it just felt good to talk to someone else who felt as if they were remotely close to Gyro’s level of intellect.

Dr. Von Drake might have been a bit scatterbrained, but he was brilliant and a real renaissance man to boot. Gyro admired him tremendously, though he did take the man’s words with a grain of salt due to the aforementioned scatterbrained-ness.

Gyro liked to have something mindless he could work on while he was on a call with someone, even someone as interesting to talk to as Dr. Von Drake. Having to sit still and focus on a conversation and struggle with eye contact on a webcam was a surefire recipe for not only boredom but also his attention wandering away. On particularly bad days, he might end up feather-picking, which was an embarrassing nervous tic he’d spent decades trying to conquer.

So today he was shoulders deep repairing a jet engine (burnt out courtesy of Launchpad McQuack) when his conversation with Dr. Von Drake shifted from the doctor’s latest oil painting experiments to what Gyro had been up to recently.

“Nothing that exciting, I’m afraid,” Gyro said. “It feels like all I do anymore is repair things. A never-ending cycle of maintenance, something which should have been passed on to technicians instead of taking up my valuable time! I’m always chasing after old projects, trying to keep them from falling apart. The Gizmo-suit. And Lil’ Bulb. And--”

“Dr. Gearloose,” 2BO said, suddenly appearing at Gyro’s side. “Can I go over to Huey’s to play?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Thank you!” 2BO chirped enthusiastically as it activated its rocket jets, the turbines spinning up rapidly.

“Just make sure you don’t stay out too late!” Gyro shouted, raising his voice so 2BO could hear him over the roar of its propulsion system.

“I’ll be home at seven!” 2BO said with a smile, rising from the floor and flying out one of the emergency air lock exits. Gyro could see the android shoot out under the water, flying past the lab’s windows as it gained altitude and finally vanished from sight, leaving nothing but a flurry of bubbles in its wake.

“My goodness, what a charming little boy!” Dr. Von Drake said. “Is he yours or perhaps the child of a coworker?”

“Oh, it’s not a child,” Gyro explained. “That’s 2BO, it’s just an android I helped create as a student.”

“Just an android? Gyro, my boy, he is quite remarkable! Even with the rocket jets for feet, I was entirely ready to accept that he was a real boy. Why haven’t you ever shown him to me before? You’ve never even mentioned him.”

Gyro had been dreading this particular topic, though he’d always known it would come up someday. He set down his tools and wiped the oil from his hands, fidgeting with the shop towel as he tried to pick his words.

“It’s a long story, sir.”

“That’s no problem, I have long ears!” Dr. Von Drake replied, which was nonsensical enough that it made Gyro chuckle.

“That is manifestly untrue.” Gyro felt himself smiling just a little. Though they were thousands of miles apart and only interacting through an impersonal and cold computer screen, Dr. Von Drake’s warm and nonjudgmental presence still felt as reassuring now as it had when Gyro had been a young man. “But since you insist… Before I came to work for you, I worked for Dr. Inutaro Akita in Tokyolk.”

“I’ve met him,” Dr. Von Drake said, prompting Gyro to continue.

“He was already working on 2BO when I started assisting him. It was designed to be an autonomous defense drone, capable of interacting with end users in a naturalistic way. But something went wrong.”

“With 2BO?”

“No, with Dr. Akita. Originally I thought it was a fault in 2BO, but it was just following orders. Dr. Akita ordered 2BO to go on a rampage, and it performed exactly as designed.”

“That’s awful!” Dr. Von Drake exclaimed. “But now that you mention it, I remember reading something about a robot attacking Tokyolk way back when. It’s hard to believe all that destruction was caused by little 2BO… But if he was created by Dr. Akita I can’t say I’m too surprised. The man has ‘mad scientist’ practically stamped on his forehead. He’s a terrible sore loser. Matilda said he’s not allowed at the annual canasta game after what happened to that china cabinet.”

Gyro was morbidly curious to know what had happened that would make the sweet-tempered Matilda McDuck ban someone from the International Robot Designer Union’s annual card game, but he knew better than to ask. Dr. Von Drake was likely to actually tell him the whole story and that could take hours - hours that Gyro didn’t want to spare.

“So how is it that he’s come to live with you now?” Dr. Von Drake asked. “The incident in Tokyolk was a long time ago.”

“Somehow 2BO turned up here in Duckburg,” Gyro explained. “I had no idea that 2BO was even operational anymore. I thought it had been destroyed, but it wasn’t and now it’s here, and it’s just another thing I have to constantly do maintenance on.

“It has these terrible glitches that are triggered by random stimuli. I’ve been working on it for a whole month, and it seems like the problems just keep getting worse. I’m not making any progress. I told Fenton to get in touch with some programmers to find a specialist to help me resolve the issue, but--”

“Tell me more about these glitches,” Dr. Von Drake said. “Maybe I can help you figure it out.”

“Well, as I said, 2BO was originally designed to be a defense drone, so obviously it has a weapons system.”

“Obviously.”

“But 2BO’s also a highly complex learning system. It was meant to interact with people the way another person might, and that kind of processing power normally takes up a much larger footprint than 2BO has.”

“It’s not a remote system?” Dr. Von Drake asked. This wasn’t an unreasonable question, as most AI’s of 2BO’s complexity were at least the size of a car. There weren’t that many out there that Gyro was aware of, but they did exist. He assumed that most of them were confidential government projects. None of them were really like 2BO though. Advanced AI technology had been a stagnant field since the end of the Cold War.

“No, 2BO is entirely self-contained. It can be remote controlled in theory, but, under normal circumstances, all it needs to operate is onboard.”

“And you say it’s been functioning independently for… How long?”

“Twenty years on its own without meaningful human intervention. No maintenance, no repairs.”

“Remarkable!” Dr. Von Drake took off his glasses to polish them, something he usually did when he was excited. “Can you send me the latest core memory dump? I’m sure it’s a doozy of a file, but I’d like to look it over.”

“Of course, though… Hmm.” Gyro considered the reality of sending the file over the internet. “It’s almost a terabyte.”

“That’s not so large, we can keep talking while it sends over the WAN. A terabyte shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”

The suggestion of sending the data across the McDuck Enterprises’ global intranet made Gyro hesitate. It was one thing to send Dr. Von Drake a funny cat video through their company emails, it was another thing entirely to send proprietary data that wasn’t official McDuck Enterprises work through the data pipeline that Mr. McDuck so generously provided to their labs.

“Are you sure that’s alright?” Gyro asked. He’d long given up working on anything while having this conversation, and was watching Dr. Von Drake on his desktop monitor while picking at the feathers on his left wrist. “I know you’re Mr. McDuck’s brother-in-law, but it’s still using company resources for a personal project.”

“Pish-tosh! Don’t worry about it so much, my boy. After all, are you debugging Boyd on a personal computer, or are you using McDuck resources to do it?”

“I am using the McDuck lab equipment,” Gyro admitted grudgingly. “I’ve been here so long, I always think of it as my lab equipment. I do a lot of work here that isn’t strictly for Mr. McDuck, but this is different.”

“How so?”

“Those other things I work on are never anything this important,” Gyro said. “Like using the laser cutter to cut out pieces when I was making myself a suit of armor, or when I made myself a new headset. I designed it on my workstation using my company edition of CAD and printed it with the 3D printer after hours. I bought my own filament and used that for the build, but it’s a small project, and if Mr. McDuck wanted to copyright the design and mass produce them, it wouldn’t matter, even if I just designed it for my personal use.

“2BO is different,” Gyro continued. “Both the chassis and the programming are proprietary designs that belong to Akita International.”

“That company went bankrupt and ceased to exist years ago,” Dr. Von Drake pointed out. “You don’t expect them to show up on your doorstep and demand custody of 2BO, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Gyro admitted, wincing as he tugged a feather loose from his wrist. He set it down on his desk and crossed his arms over his chest in an attempt to stop picking at himself. “Dr. Akita is in jail, but he does still have living family. And there could possibly be old creditors that might come after 2BO if they realize it’s still functional. Anyway, what I’m really concerned about is that if I send the data through the McDuck Enterprises system, then they’ll have legal grounds to claim the data as theirs.”

“Please, Scroogey wouldn’t do something like that!” Dr. Von Drake said.

“Mr. McDuck might not, but the company absolutely would,” Gyro said, recalling his many unpleasant encounters with the McDuck Enterprises’ Board of Directors. “I’ll ship it to you overnight on a jump drive. You can tell me what you think of it when it arrives.”

“Alright, alright. But back to the subject at hand, you were talking about the hardware and software that your android runs on.”

“Right. 2BO’s hardware is a combination of chemical and crystal processors operating a GIST framework, using a program derived from the FELT system.”

“Ahh, like TOODLES! You remember TOODLES from when you worked here, don’t you? He’s built on crystal microprocessors and a GIST framework as well.”

Unfortunately Gyro did remember TOODLES, the omnipresent AI that controlled Dr. Von Drake’s lab at McDuck castle in Scotland. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly wrong with TOODLES, but the AI had been designed as a caretaker, a nanny of sorts, and it tended to treat everyone it came into contact with like a child. It got on Gyro’s nerves very quickly.

“I do remember TOODLES,” Gyro said, as diplomatically as possible. “I didn’t realize it shared the same architecture as 2BO. I guess I never really looked under the hood.” In truth, Gyro had avoided TOODLES whenever possible in the seven years he’d worked for Dr. Von Drake.

“And that’s a shame, TOODLES is quite the complex fellow. He’s even older than your 2BO, born in 1980.”

“Activated. You mean activated in 1980,” Gyro corrected, but to no avail as Dr. Von Drake simply continued on.

“However, I think the primary difference is that TOODLES has absolutely no conflict programming, as he is not a weapon, and that he has never been on his own. When he learns new things, I’m right here to help him through it, and to make sure TOODLES has properly understood whatever his new experience was. 2BO, I assume, has many different layers of programming, from his weapons systems to navigation to human interaction. Living on his own for twenty years with no one to help him properly understand the things he has experienced, well, I’m sure his code looks like a big plate of spaghetti by now!”

Two days later, Gyro received an email from Dr. Von Drake.

NEXT CHAPTER: Dr. Bara Summary:  Fenton and Boyd chat on the way to the lab. Gyro introduces himself in the most melodramatic way possible, and Dr. Bara meets everyone at McDuck Enterprises R&D. Dr. Bara starts assessing Boyd and things get worse before they get better. Gyro thinks he's helping.